Cycling 1:14:00 [3] 27.4 km (2:42 / km)
Switched today to the extended bike ride into work, via Kew Boulevard (once I'd waited forever for the lights to cross Chandler Highway; at least I had Rob Crawford to talk to) and the Yarra Trail. Was reminded in the process that my back doesn't enjoy being in the crouch position with a backpack for extended periods (on a normal commute it gets periodic breaks at traffic lights). A decent ride otherwise.
The leg is continuing to improve and is no longer painful to walk on, just a bit uncomfortable, and didn't freak out when I ran a few steps on it today. Perhaps a couple of days away (maybe even tomorrow depending on how it feels when I get up).
Part of my evening activity was my intermittent practice of trawling historical newspapers at the State Library for a series of articles I write on notable weather events - tonight's was a notable severe windstorm and associated flooding (both river and storm surge) which affected first South Australia, then Victoria and Tasmania, from 6-10 August 1955.
One of the occupational hazards of this activity is being sidetracked by other things which appeared in the papers, and the story which particularly got my attention was the one which was competing with the storm for the front pages of the 8th - a shooting in which a man (described by the Adelaide Advertiser as a "crazed migrant") stormed into his ex-girlfriend's house at 46 Otterington Grove, Ivanhoe, and killed her father and wounded four others before turning the gun on himself (and you thought this sort of thing was a recent development?). The reason this got my attention was that at the time, my mother (who was five) was living at number 48. Family folklore has it that my grandfather and another neighbour were crouching in the bushes, ready to shoot the perpetrator themselves if the police didn't turn up PDQ (guns being a lot more widespread in 1955 households than they are now). I knew this had happened sometime around 1955 or 1956 but hadn't previously known the date.
And that wasn't all; other highlights included:
- a big splash in the Herald-Sun about the unpaved streets of Macleod turning to mud in the wet winter and the Heidelberg City Council's disinclination to do anything about it
- proof that political journalists were ready to let their imaginations run ahead of reality in 1955, too, in the form of a Sydney Morning Herald story which reported as fact that on Monday the NSW Labor Party was going to follow the lead of their Victorian comrades and split (they didn't)
- a piece about snow and ice potentially affecting the first stage of the Tour of Tasmania (and if you ask me, Hobart to St. Mary's sounds like a pretty decent haul for a first stage).
- and, still in Tasmania, an editorial in the Mercury lamenting how young people these days weren't interested in sticking with a job and instead were fickle souls who moved on whenever they found something more lucrative or more interesting - except for the absence of the term "generation Y", just about every word of this could have appeared in a newspaper in 2012.