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In the end, I bit the bullet and bought a new one.

I mean, a new dryer. That hex nut driver arrived the same day—i.e., today—as the new dryer, which, I think, shows the power of karma. Power of sometning. Power of bloody money, if you come right down to it.

Anyway, with the new dryer comoing, it was time to get rid of the old one. Now, dryers are not that heacy. Essentially, they are mostly air. They have to be or they couldn’t blow warm air over your dainties to dry them. So, being slightly filled with air due to breathing and certain other gases due to having sausages for lunch, thought I could easily hoik out the old one to the carport where it could be left until I could scrounge a tip run off someone.

It proved about as light as I thought, but so bloody awkward that by the time I made it from the laundry to the back door, around seven feet (0.01060606… furlongs), my heart was beating like a buggered tumble dryer and I was panting like a buggered tumble dryer and my pulse was racing like a buggered tumble dryer’s would be if dryer theory had taken a different path. Nonetheless, after a few lifts and occasional drops, and a fair bit of swearing, I made it out to the carport, where I dumped the damn thing and, puffing like an old and decrepit fat slob, I walked back into the house.

The delivery was scheduled for between 10:36 and 13:36. They give you a three hour window but can be accurate to the minute for the window edges. They turned up at 12:38, so not too bad. I asked them to just leave the package in the carport and I’d take care of the rest.

So I waved the delivery guys goodbye, explaining theat I didn’t get the ‘take away my old dryer’ option because the Good Guys website said the Ballarat store didn’t offer it. I signed my name on the guy’s phone reader thing, and we parted on good terms.

I lifted the new dryer. It was probably thirty feet (0.0049373613424356332659657807943226927710446798285748141906348130056680908211161069893287163518824513011592924432038866908487653305069682626412908237493663719610540937308677247980619210943825994219995655 nautical miles) from the carport to the laundry. I could do it.

I hear a friendly laugh from behind me. “Now, that is something I never expected to see.” I put the dryer down as delicately as I could and turned. “Darren carrying a washer around.”

There were two of these interlopers. Stephen Brown and Nova de Vandall are two of Ballarat Writers’ best writers. It was the former who had expressed surprise at my Herculean efforts. They had dropped around to do some printing, but Stephen offered to do the heavy lifting. Well, it was light lifting, but he’s half my age, has a far more active lifestyle and rarely indulges in the health-giving properties of flavoured ethanol. After he’d peel away the packaging, I was left with this:

It’s 2-star efficiency, the door is big enough to get a good view of the tumbling clothes, but it’s plastic. It’s a Westinghouse, not a Simpson, but it has a 6.5 kg (32500 carat) capacity. And its nuts are probably ⅔” octagons, but it seems quiet and will probably dry my clothes. I’ll let you know.

So, the dryer began to squeak a bit. Then it made some interesting clicking sounds. Then a regular thump that sounded like the ticking drumbeat of doom. For it, I mean. I was probably okay, except for the inconvenience of not having a tumble dryer to (tumblngly) dry my clothes.

My first response was to get it repaired. This is not something you do lightly in Ballarat in the first couple of months of the calendar year. Places close, some close down, and what remains open has a waiting list so long it’s the envy of the public hospital system.

Buying a new one seemed to be option 2. This has the advantage that places who want to sell you things are nearly always open, even in Ballarat. I priced out a few dryers: the best option I found was a Westinghouse at $549 For a dryer? Good God, they’re only a fan, an element and a motor type thing to turn the drum! But they’re whitegoods, the shops can’t sell one every day, so they make them expensive to cover their lack of profit in the months when the poor buyer isn’t buying a new one.

But what did I think was going to thappen? Of course dryers are that expenisve at The Good Guys – Leading Appliance & Entertainment. Retailer These were the guys who’d try to sell me a one cup sized coffee pod machine for $200. But where else was I going to go? Betta Electric and Allwares have both closed their shops here, so here I was…$549 for a new dryer. Or wait till the middle of February to have someone come around and have a look at my current one for $160+time+parts+GST= $∞

Hubris

Or I could repair it myself. How hard could it be? The belt is squeaking, the thing tis thumping, all I needed to do was put the belt back into position and see what was thumping and thump it till it couldn’t thump no more.

This is what confronted me.

But taking the back off to get at the dryer’s vitals wasn’t going to be easy, I assumed. No way would they have put screws on it that an ordinary flathead or Philips head would be able to mess with. I leapt immediately to the Internet and discovered that what I needed was a ‘qaurter-inch hex nut driver’. Nut driver?

With no idea what that was, I went immediately to Amazon, and the Australian segment of them had a panoply of ¼” hex nut drivers. I settled on one or two I won’t bore you with, but I got two because if I only get one thing, it inevitably turns out to be the wrong thing. Amazon advised me that one of the purchases would be arriving on January 26^th. It shows the respect for Australia Day we currently have that the peons are still delivering on a public holiday.

I’d accomplished the part of the process I was reasonably confident about—the purchasing—but wasn’t confident that a ¼” hex nut driver was really the thing I wanted. I reasoned that I could always send them back if they weren’t the right thing or hang onto them against the day when some ¼” hex nuts would come into my life. But just to make sure, I called my nephew. He is the closest thing we have to a mechanic in the family, having once been a mechanic, and he’s always been handy with his hands.

He asked to see a picture of the nuts concerned and this is what confronted him:

He assured me that that was, indeed, the type of nut I’ve been crapping on about ad nauseam so far. It seemed like I’d ordered the right type of driver, after all. He further advised that “A socket set is a good thing to have, anyway” and I said that, since I was confident about purchasing things, I’d keep it in mind. You never know, right?

On stepping to the front door early on the Mnday there the parcel from Amazon was. I stripped it of its mailing sheath and this is what confrnted me:

After the usual nightmare of tackling plastic packaging and one false start, I discovered that the right-hand nut driver drove a nut like a maniac and in a few minutes I had remved the back of the dryer. This is what confrontd me:

Nemesis

“What the fuck?” was all I could say. This didn’t look anything like what I imagined it would be. I had visualised belts and heating elememnts and some things I could get a mental handle on, not some metal plate that came straight out of the Spanish Inquisition. At the lower left, you can see some springs.

What were they for? At thr lower right is a round cap that I had, at an earlier time I won’t bore you wiht, worked out. If you remove it you can put tubes into the round hole and vent the hot air outside. I was venting some hot air inside, well modulated through my vocal chords in much the same way as the opening of this paragraph.

However, I hadn’t really done anything, had I? I’d just taken the back off. If I dried some things in it, it would still dry, right? So I loaded it up with socks and undies and pushed the button. After two hours I discovered that the items were colder and wetter than they’d come out of the dryer as, and that there was cold air blowing out of the vent.

Apparently, I reasoend, the heating element is at the bottom of the dryer, somewhere around those springs, and the fan sucks up hot air vents into the dryer tub via the contours of the back of the thing that I had earlier removed (see above). There was nothing for it, then but to screw the back back on so the aerodynamically sophisticated fucking voodoo the designers had conjured up could do its duty. Fortunately, I’d taken a photo to guide me through the process:

In less than thirty-six minutes, I had replaced one of the ¼” hex nuts and the rest gradually fell into place like memories of a salon with four or five of my pisshead mates.

So went my handyman adventure. Note how it fulfills the style of the Greek tragedy. If Sophocles had had a tumble dryer and my mechanical aptitude, he’d’ve written this post.

Meanwhile, I struggle with writing a story that I started before all this nonsense, about a haunted tumble dryer. The Simpson dryer still works. Sometimes, it sings like a bird. Most times, it squeals like a rat. Warm, dry stuff comes out of it.

Lucky for me, they’ve got a sale on.

/

I’ve done it. I’ve gone and done it. I’ve finally gone and done it. There are other phrases to describe completion of a task, and the achievement that goes with that, and the feeling of satisfaction that goes with both those things. If those opening phrases of mine don’t seem appropriate after you’ve read this, supply your own.

The Website

When I was eith Internode, it was a time when ISP’s (and that’s an apostrophe of contraction, as was the one in ‘that’s’, although the ones bracketing the pronoun were…another kind of apostrophe) supplied you with additional things to keep you loyal to them. It was a competitive market because there were multiple ISPs (no apostrophe there, just in case). But consolidation happened around the time the dotcom bubble burst, and so nowadays ost ISPs are run by phone companies who aren’t in a competitive market. So, Internode offered me personal webspace.

www.users.on.net/~hippy/default.htm was the address. Don’t look for it now. Internode got rid of personal webspace about ten years ago now, and I had to move it to another provider

Extreme Networks

My brother worked for this excellent company. I’d recommend them if I had a better idea of what they actually do. What they actually did do was host my personal webspace fora a while. During that time, I was trying to learn HTML, so I was adding pages just because I’d found out how to do it, I was using Microsoft Expression Web and getting used to writing things with angle brackets and putting ‘target=”_blank”‘ on links. I had been using Frontpage because I could get it cheaply under the academic pricing model they had, thanks to studying at RMIT. So, from time to time, as I found new things to do with HTML, or the spirit moved me, I would add various things to it. It wasn’t elegant, and it didn’t do much, and it had less of my personal expression than LiveJournal or even Captain Lychee, essentially because there’s more stuff on it.

Including, from some internet meme or other that I don’t recall, The Foxfoe. I left it there, and added a few more things, but essentailly the website languished until 2024, when my brother left Extreme Networks and went to work for…someone or other. They make seeds and sell them for farms, nurseries, whatever. So, he suggested I move CaptLychee.com to DreamITHost, so I did. They’re also hosting this WordPress blog that I had to do for uni and update really sporadically.

But I didn’t move the original Internode site.

And then, along came Geoff Ball.

Quality Fiction

I studdied English Literature in high school with Geoff and Vanessa Berry and, I disocerd recently, he and I didn’t do that well at it. But we have both perservered at writing, and Geoff put up a few stories at the link above, for which he wanted commentgs. Well, if there’s anything I like expressing more than my opinion, I don’t know what it is, so I ventured some. I vengture this summary here—they’re good.

So, we offered to share some stories with each other, and I was going to point him to ‘The Foxfoe’ but discovered that the website it appeared on was no longer on the Internet, because I’d backed it up after Internode removed personal webspace after jacking up their fees. There was nothing for it but to find the story on one of my hard drives and email it to him. But that reminded me that the rest of the wegbsite was also no longer on the Internet, so nobody could see it unless it was on the Internet Archive, and what were the chances of that?

Return of the Website

And so, I determined to return the website to the Internet, so everyone could be exposed to the ‘The Foxfoe’ and other aspects of my egotism. The real horror was trying to get the damn thing online using File Transfer Protocol. I had to get my brother to help with that. There seems to be sometning with DreamITHost’s setup that makes FTP really difficult, or really confusing.

The problem seems to be that Expression Web 4—which, now that I think of it, I paid for—uses different terms than DreamITHost. ‘Location, ‘directory’, ‘sever’—I know what these words mean in some contexts, but in the context of transferring files, nope. And sometimes differnet terms are used for the smae ting.

Anyway, over the years, one thing I did learn to do was register domain ammes. As part of Ballarat Writers, I had had various conversations that inspird domains I could register. One of them was bagmyshit.com, and more of that when I get around to doing the actual website. But I had played around with an anagram of my name.

Rotundrear.com

The website has returned, including ‘The Foxfoe’ and a few other things, and I’ll update a few of the things that aren’t working, if I can. UNtil that happens, enjoy what’s there.

Text Message

I got up at 6:45AM on Friday the 9^th of September and read this message from Pete, dated 6:32AM

Very sad news about the Queen

I responded the way anyone would

WHAT!!!

He said to turn on the ABC, which I did.  A rare thing for me to watch breakfast TV, because it’s usually utter drivel, but not this morning.  I dealt with the news that you all know by now.  Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, was dead.

Of course Her Majesty was mortal, and was going to die someday, and seeing as she was a fair few years older than me, probably before I did.  But when something as permanent as Our Sovereign Lady ceases to be, everything seems to be chaos.  Anything that can happen will, as they say, but I thought I would live a short enough life that I wouldn’t have to seee something like this.  The whole underpinning of what I hold to be true and good in the world—the lawful transfer of power in government, pomp and circumstance, the idea that the head of state is above all the bullshit that accompanies politics in these shitholes in which we find ourselves trapped—went with the Queen.

Grief

“My God…”, I wrote. “I can’t believe it.”

A few days have passed and I am now believing it. Nonetheless, I was pretty depressed on Friday but that was just the shock. I had a few too many at Aunty Jack’s that night and, while I nearly always enjoy a few too many wherever I have them, when I got home some fourteen hours after first hearing the news, the shock had gone but the grief had ballooned out to the point where I waas writing drunk and not very coherent emails.

I wrote one to The Drunken Odyssey asking John King to acknowledge the death of Her Majesty and he very nicely did at the start of episode 540.

As C J Hall said, it still feels like I lost my grandma.

HM Charles III

What, then, to make of the new King? It has been said that he wants to rule, not just reign, but he can’t make arbitrary decisions on things without the consent of Parliament, like the first Charles tried to do, but he will pay a lot of attention to what the Parliament tries to do. We may see cases where Bills fail to get Royal Assent because they do things the King doesn’t like. He’s a keen conservationist and he believes strongly in good town planning and good architecture, so Bills which do both those things will get a much quicker assent or an assent with fewer requests for review.

At least, in England and the rest of the United Kingdom. In the Commonwealth he will have to deal with ‘interesting times’. The Australian republican movement will probably catch on again; New Zealand will take further steps to remove some of the older institutions—for example, changing the Crown Solicitor to the Director of Public Prosecutions—and as to Canda, who knows? So much for the good nations in the Commonwealth, what of the remaining ones? The Caribbean nations have become, or are agitating for becoming republics, including Barbados!. Barbados, for Christ’s sake. The most English of the West Indies has thrown the monarchy away. Well, fuck ’em. If they want an Indian president, they can have one. And in Africa, the populations will have ‘post colonialism’ to fall back on as an explanation of why they can’t get their sewers cleaned or protect their citizens from Islamic terrorism.

The Next Three Kings

So, let’s assume HM Charles III lives to be ninety-six. Imagine the world of 2044 to be an interesting one. Australia with forty million people, most of whom live in Melbourne. The UK, perhaps now changing its name to ‘The United Kingdom of England, Wales and Northern Ireland’ after the secession of Scotland in 2035, 290 years after what my Duolingo course in Scottish Gaelic calls ‘An Blàr Chùil Lodair’ but which we Anglophones call the Battle of Culloden. Welsh and Cornish are now spoken in Wales and Cornwall. The Isle of Thanet is now a tax haven. Canada has dallied with becoming a republic but looks south again to see how that would turn out. The remaining forty-three of the United States are ruled by a religious cult that still adheres to the remains of the US Constitution where convenient. The Sino-Indian war is in its fourth year, with no signs of either side either letting up or using nukes. Sri Lanka has been a silent, closed country since it abandoned electricity and the Internet. Barbados is run from Delhi.

But we have three stable Kings in a row now. Assuming an average mortality age of ninety-six for each of them, we will see King Wiliam V in 2044, and King George VII in 2078, and then his successor in 2107.

I should live so long.

I don’t know what I’m doing here.

That’s a general observation about life. But why bore you with that? Let us be more specific. I don’t know hat I’m doing settting up a WordPress site under my main site.

but that’s what the teaching team for the Bachelor of Arts degree at Fedration University wants me to do for the subject, so here we are. Over the next few months you’ll be seeing a weekly post from me – oh, and let’s not worry about why there’s a weird user name up there. WordPress made that up. I was just following ze orders – until I found out how to fix it.

so, yes, a weekly post responding to various issues raised about Digital Art. What is Digital Art? That’s what I’m going to try to learn and opine about. Come along for the ride!

You know you have to…

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