… ‘Rain! Rain!’ cried the old Shepard, as he stumbled down into the valley, heading for where the in-crowd gathered every morning beneath gayly coloured silks which fluttered in the morning breeze.

“Oh, heck, here he comes again.” they said. “Doesn’t he know about breathable, water-proof top layers, and sweat-wicking, odour-eating base layers?” They tittered knowingly as they quaffed their coffees made from perfectly heated, whole-cream cows milk, with a dollop of vanilla ice cream and a few drops of caramel.

After the rain, the old Shepard wondered beneath the drab, soggy silks, their colours all blending into each other. There were overturned chairs and fancy rain-coats scattered about among the puddles.

When the human was a child, it rode it’s pushbike across this rail bridge every evening on the way to pick up it’s allotment of newspapers for it’s paper run…

… it could be quite scary for a 12 year-old, riding across this ancient, steel structure during winter, with entire trees, washed from up-country, crashing into the bridge piles, making the whole structure vibrate like a gong… all the trapped trees would create a deafening roar as the incomprehensible volumes of water coursed through, and over them. If you looked for more than a few seconds at the water raging over the log-jams, it began to feel like the whole bridge was moving sideways.

It was also a trip into unknown territory, as the human lived on the opposite side of the river, making for unpleasant encounters, on the narrow footbridge, with thugs from the other side… but mostly it was just fabulous, especially with massive freight trains, sometimes with three diesel locomotives pulling them (not much further over the bridge, the rail track faces a very long, steep incline, as it climbs out of the river valley), rumbling across the bridge… for some reason that huge rumble was comforting, unlike the scary tree collisions.

As an adult, the human loves these time-bitten, almost Victorian, steel structures, with all their industrial-scale details, like service pipes and huge bolts and rivets. The freight trains are shorter, these days, trucks having gutted the rail-freight industry, but the human still loves them, and finds their careful, low-speed rumble just as comforting (:

There are a lot of gorgeous art deco houses (and commercial buildings) in Whanganui. Where we live there are just a lot of gorgeous old houses… part of the enjoyment of our early dawn walks is looking at these places as we pass… living rooms already (still?) awash in the flicker of monstrous wall screens, cats on door-steps waiting to be let in…

… but it’s always lovely to get back to the equally-gorgeous splendour of the sinuous, muscular Whanganui River as it winds it’s way through our home town (:

Pre-dawn light is just the most gorgeous, super-saturated eye-candy (:

We are still alive!

We have spent the last few months getting ready to die. This has meant, among many other things, totally abandoning our whole SL world. It literally took us a couple of years to do that, it was such a big part of our lives… now it’s gone.

We gave up our addiction to AI-generated art about a year ago. For the last year, it has been almost impossible for us to sit comfortably, long enough, to blog, and that got doubly hard a few months ago, so we just have not been doing so. However…

In the last few months, things have stabilised dramatically for us, that too-good-to-be-true kind of dramatic improvement in living quality. We have spent it frantically setting our affairs in order, re-writing our will, and sending most of our treasures to our sons, who live in the South Island, which, due to government monopolies, is a very expensive place to be sending large paintings and a chainsaw, not to mention boxes and boxes of books… it is usually cheaper to fly, or post things, to Australia than it is to send them from the North Island, to the South. We have largely accomplished all those goals, have got on board with all the organisations available to support the terminally ill… in New Zealand, if you are terminally ill, you hook up with the ‘Hospice’ organisation, and all your medication/doctor visits/general nursing help, with them, is free, which is very nice, because when you are dying of cancer, you can spend a shit-ton of money on those things.

The thing is, all the crappy things that have happened to our body have all been either directly caused by chemo/radiation treatment, or are side-effects of those nasty things. They are all the things that have, miraculously, settled down, recently, and become manageable horrors, lurking in the wings. The thing that is supposed to kill us within the next 3 months, bowel cancer metastasised in our lungs, is barely even noticeable, yet. We bought a cheap ‘kneeling chair’, which has made it possible for us to sit at the computer for far longer than we’ve been able to, in the last few years. So, here we are, blogging again, literally waiting to die.

Every day, since our recently improved life condition, we go for a fifty minute, pre-dawn walk, which is very good for our soul. Above is a picture from this morning’s walk (: