In less than three weeks I will be in Italy. Even the weather this past week is acting like its summer again in a fortnight. That's perfect as I had a lot of hummus to get through before I go away.

It definitely feels like ANZAC day has been transitioning over the years from the first day of winter into a late-Autumn last gasp glimpse of summer. Today's weather was so exceptional that it felt appropriate to take Vanessa and my ANZAC tradition on the road and I ate this year's giant cookie at the midpoint of the Seacliff to Hallet Cove coastal walk.

Somehow, in spite of my aging and dilapidated body, I made it through the whole thing. I finished the walk too.

I laughed uncontrollably recently because I caught myself - while driving beneath blue skies - thinking that nothing bad had happened for the year yet. This was on the fifth of January. The fact that I considered this a milestone is a testament to what the last few years have been like for me. I'm trying to delay the period of my life that I'm addicted to painkillers, but occasionally I will relent and let myself swallow some codeine and twenty minutes later a layer of tension will be sheared off of me and I realise that I am constantly living like that. It's disconcerting.

So when I revisit Summer 22-23 and its soundtrack will I want it to remind me of the warm and also cloudy days that are starting to be consumed by chilly dawns that penetrate deeper into the mornings each week? I didn't hate my summer. I enjoyed the occasional submersion in the ocean, rounds of Chameleon, eating salads, walking up steep hills, reading books about Paris and eating a lot of passionfruit. The injuries and illnesses of myself, Vanessa and Nash only served to make me crave more of the good things that life offers. The adventure, the flavours, the photographs for later.

Music has always been important to me, but recently I've been using music as a link between the past and the present, a medium for nostalgia. This summer music has not been a channel as much as it has been a release. Like a milligram of codeine, a song can displace the tension and be a reminder of the perks of living. Just little moments during a day when my other senses are demoted by the vocal range of Caroline Polachek over smooth synths. Or the pulsing rhythm of Urban Funk. Dre-like piano paired with dubstep wobbles. French disco-house mixed on 2022 computers promising bonus summers of glossy sophistication. Simple, catchy melodies. Atmospheric trance. The lick of guitars and the memories of fully-intact summers of my youth. Keyboard pop and emotive vocals. The songs on this summer's playlist are not related to memories, but distractions from them. Music is one thing that hasn't been taken from me yet.

I have been in a good mood these past two heatwave mornings in January 2023.

Yesterday I walked to the supermarket to buy pitas for pizzas, as well as cheap salad ingredients.

Right after the three gigantic cucumbers I'd selected were bagged at the checkout I felt a sneeze coming on. Even with the sneeze barrier and the checkout girl's facemask I did not feel comfortable sneezing in public in 2023. Every muscle in my face did its part to prevent my diaphragm from propelling. I don't know what expression this suppression left on my melon, but the guarded way she said "have a nice day" after I'd paid made me suspicious that my lips had curled in an mis-interpretable way.

This morning I walked to a different supermarket, a bit further away, to buy beans and corn. On my way I crossed path with a woman walking a pug. The tiny dog was adorned with plastic fairy wings. As I passed I was going to say, "good morning" and perhaps remark, "nice wings" - as I thought that no one would dress their dog like that without hoping for a compliment or comment. But perhaps there was something to my stride because as we drew nearer she stepped off the footpath and onto the road to avoid me. The pug didn't see this coming, nor consent, and the force on its lead sent the tiny creature skywards up and over the gutter - briefly airborne. And I understood then the intention for the wings.

I also may have fortunately prevented a potential cyber security incident this week, so overall a pretty good Friday.

Woke up at 6am for a second, annual hike up Mount Lofty on one of the only public holidays that you can hope you to get a car park. In fact, with today's forecast top of 38°C there were even more car parks available after we got back down.

We would have arrived slightly earlier, but after a week of rattling coming from the front of the car we finally isolated it to a broken guard under the engine and I spent five minutes gaffing it back together. This wasn't fun as I had to get down on the already warm bitumen twice, but while I was down there I got a glimpse of the cirrococumulus cloud high in the early morning sky and that was pretty.

I’m not procrastinating. I actually want to know what’s going to happen to my Scrobbles after I die? I’ve already accumulated more than 300,000 of them. Will Last.FM look after them? Maybe add whatever songs get played at my funeral to the list?

And what will happen to my steps? I got 4,901 last Saturday and 21,689 on Monday. Every day I accumulate all these steps and when I cease to exist I guess they will cease to exist even though they all definitely did happen. I guess a lot of them were stepped in places where other steps by other people happened and some of those people are already dead and so these steps kind of exist as an independent entity and the ones I take are just a temporal association with that sneaker-shaped piece of earth.

I wore a singlet to the supermarket this evening and I couldn’t help wondering how I must exist in the minds of the checkout people who see me there so frequently over the years. Singlet, shirt, jumper, jacket, jumper, shirt, singlet. Over and over it loops and all I am is some other person wearing different things and buying bananas and meat on clearance. In my defense they are also on an endless cycle of being different people so I can’t imagine I owe them much. Although that actually makes me a little sad.

I was asked recently what I would do if I could freeze time. I don’t know what the right answer to that question is, but my response was that I would try and get all my projects done. Novels to finish. Novels to edit. Novels to rewrite. Programming activities and photography projects I want to finish. I know it’s an artistic cliche to always be distracted from a project you’re working on by a project you’re not, but I’m wondering if it’s more than that. Perhaps life is just a series of incomplete projects until you die and leave them behind, unfinished and with as much meaning as a pile of Scrobbles.

Or maybe I am procrastinating.

Seems like Spring Summer has finally arrived.