Question one, why would someone organise and host a quiz night for their own birthday party? That one is worth zero points, because I'm not totally sure of the answer myself.

There must be something in my nature that aligns to the structure of the quiz, even if the last Bradism.com quiz night was back in 2008. As Alex reminded me last night, I've been running quizzes since I was 14 in the back seat of Mum's Camry.

And perhaps there is something in my nature that abhors the idea of standing still while friends and family sing Happy Birthday at me for thirty seconds, and would much prefer to stand in front of a crowd with a microphone for two and a half hours.

Turning 40 isn't insignificant, and I did want to mark the milestone in a meaningful way. The quiz gave me that opportunity to make the evening about my life without making my life the focus. With (nearly) every question being Brad adjacent, and over 100 slides to showcase photos and memories, I was able to lean back against the structure of the rounds, while enjoying the company of people I like.

It was also the fortieth that I would have wanted to attend myself, hopefully inspiring some of the people in their late thirties to start planning. To give them a head start I gave everyone a small lesson on the PHP...

Overall, it was definitely the best quiz I have ever hosted and it made me feel good to bring people together and make them happy.

As the 51 questions hinted, there has been a lot of history and geography and culture and sports and music in the span of human civilisation. Ultimately my existence won't mean much in the sum of all that, but after 40 years I can appreciate that life being trivial can be an enviable thing.

I once wrote that someone told me that "Brad, your journal entries are terrible but sometimes the last line is good."

That was ten years ago, and at some point in my thirties I decided to set a reminder to write a sequel to that entry using only the last lines from entries from August 2014 - August 2024.

Last Lines Only - Part 2

They say every day is a gift, but I'm notoriously tricky to buy for. Anyway, that’s the excuse I use when I laugh out loud at my own jokes from 2013. How quickly things change over eighteen years. I guess the moral is, enjoy what you've got while you've got it. Despite all the dark parts of life, I'm undeniably privileged to post photos of summer sunsets on my journal year after year, without fear of persecution, isolation, pterodactyls, etc. That's why I only eat fruit I grew on work nights. Other than finding and eating a bulk meal curry in my freezer from September, this was the most exciting thing that happened to me in the final week of October, 2019. Maybe that's going to be a theme.

I went for a walk around the neighbourhood, enjoying the golden, sunny light knowing nearly everyone I was passing had never deployed serverless to the cloud. We saw no ducklings and were rained on several times. Plumbing is not like IT. I've never measured myself diagonally. Yes, I did find a way to make World War One all about me. It had been a mentally intense elevator ride. Those are called Bradisms. In my facial hair's defence, I did have to set it back an hour last weekend. Note, you may need to become an emperor and execute a Duke for this to work. This was not exactly an inspirational tale, but it was more inspiring than the history of Ptolemy VIII. BAM, unlimited coat-hangers for the rest of your life.

So if I want to write a great novel I need to practice and write a terrible novel, or else I might end my life being very good at writing only the beginnings of novels. But I know the moment I do it some Sherpa is going to use my backpack like a step-ladder, clamber onto my shoulders and steal my glory, leaving me with little recourse and an awkward silence the whole way back home. I guess that being tall makes it harder to avoid small talk. I was like, hmm, this is what it's like being in senior management. Then I think, oooh, free banana!

This week has been so cold and miserable that I bought a turnip to eat just to cheer myself up. Tonight I went to a 60th birthday party at the zoo with canapes and birthday cake and I was served four different animals. The horse helped me burn off a lot of oats. I mean, there are definitely victims, but the trick is to not be one. After that it could get really interesting, culinarily and otherwise. Stay tuned for analysis and stats. Guess I'll have to stick with the Zooper Doopers a while longer. Don't even get me started on the desk ergonomics. I didn't take photos of any of this.

Life has not been boring recently. But sometimes, especially since I turned 30, I do find myself tipping half the frozen berries packet into the blender instead of only a third. The obvious moral is, no matter if you focus on multiple goals, or just try and get by, ultimately we're all going to die anyway. Also, I doubt LeBron is buying the week old cabbages and capsicums from the front of the fruit and veg shop, making bulk lentil vindaloo with them, then eating them after ten days in the fridge. And it was delicious. This went on for 300 seconds. I like to think I have an average-to-good understanding of the basics of economics, politics and marketing so this wasn't particularly amazing. If we ever get an annual public holiday to commemorate global peace, I wonder what cookie there'll be to celebrate it and how big Vanessa will bake it. Maybe I'm also feeling good because I intentionally avoided reading the news for two and a half days.

Anyway, this summary doesn't have a satisfying conclusion because it's just a transition to the next one of these in however many years. Honestly I have too many sunset cows for a single entry, so contact me directly if you need more. Whatever happens next, I’ll try to journal it. Works every time.

Over the past six years I've tried a few ways of getting through winter - surgery, northern hemisphere holidays, global pandemics - with varying levels of success. Winter 2024 featured none of those and while I was still embittered about the cold a lot it was probably the most tolerable winter I can recall having. Though not as tolerable as hiking through forests in western Europe.

What was the trick to this?

Better warmth strategy. I bought an alpine-quality puffer jacket in May, and upgraded my old North Face jacket during winter as well. I bought gloves with mini heaters in them. You just need to recharge the batteries every couple of days.

I discovered the benefits of wearing pyjama pants under my tracksuit pants for extra warmth. I bought new socks. I wore beanies. There was a single morning it was cold enough to justify wearing all of the above at the same time. Most of the time I was able to coordinate a few of these together such that I did not feel cold while being outside. This resulted in less grumbling.

Indoors, I gave up on watching television in my freezing living room and spent every night at home in my study with the door shut and the heater running. Even that was still pretty chilly and didn't stop me from teaming the pyjama pants and tracksuit pants at times, but it was tolerable.

Good distractions - one technical project and one mindless pastime. The former was designing and building the quiz website. The latter was beating Breath of the Wild, which I actually completed around the second weekend of July and then I didn't play any games after. But it got me past the solstice.

Getting sun on my arms at every opportunity. Mostly by timing my lunch breaks for around 2pm on days when there were no clouds, and walking really fast to justify removing my jumper.

Also what definitely helped was not getting sick, other than the tail end of a cold in the first days of June. How I managed this is probably due to a lack of social activity and well timed vaccines, but it absolutely made the season way less shit. Also having most of August off when it was serendipitously quite sunny certainly accelerated the transition into spring.

All of that was good, but I think solid routines were the real key to getting through winter. Trips to the markets on Saturday mornings, walking Nash to the bakery on Sundays. Birthday month's daily desserts. Inviting myself around to Alex's fire on the weekends. Coffee and progressive trance between 9 and 10 each workday.

A paper titled Routine and the Perception of Time in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that a key factor of people remembering time as passing more slowly was "anchors of novelty", and by removing a lot of novelty from my life in Winter it certainly does feel like it breezed by.

Actually, considering I did work two major projects, changed jobs, had a colonoscopy and a two week holiday I'm not sure those enjoyable routines really did help that much, and maybe it was the pyjamas plus tracksuits that was the real MVP.

Or perhaps it was actually the new music.

I have finished reviewing the photos I took in Europe in 2023 (for 2024 at least, I might go back one day).

This last batch are all from Paris and didn't feature in my journal entries from the week I spent there last June.

Let's get this one out the way early. View from atop Arc de Triomphe.

What a place to enjoy a beer on a Friday night in summer.

Let's get this one out the way early. Crêpes...

Sunset on the Seine glows through the roof of the Grand Palais.

I just enjoyed the architecture, well at least the façades.

View from atop Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre.

What a place to enjoy a picnic with friends on a Wednesday night in summer.

I was curious to find out what my friends and family thought of me, so during the recent Birthday Quiz I created a concept called Brad Bingo. Because the questions were associated with my life, it would be a fun exercise to have the teams predict in advance what topics they thought might get covered. Afterwards I was able to analyse the data and come up with this infographic which, honestly, is pretty accurate.

Dinosaurs are a bit of an outlier because the Quiz invite hinted there would be a dinosaur question.

Pizza is a hard one because it was there as an example on the Bingo sheet. In my year eight yearbook entry I got a paragraph to write about myself and I wrote "I like pizza and I like cows. Here is a picture of a pizza cow." And there was a picture of a pizza with a Cow head, legs, udder, tail, etc.

I wasn't curious to find out what my dental hygeniest thought about my mouth. During my checkup today she said I had a "great mouth to x-ray" and I decided not to ask any follow up questions in the time it took her to extract the plastic bracket thing that was between my teeth at the time.

Some other charts from the quiz, showing the number of teams that scored at least partially on each question. A good breakdown of easy, medium and hard I think. I do take responsibility for the three zeros as they could have been worded better.

Bradism.com in September so far has been very reflective. It's not surprising, considering that winter ended with a few major milestones (including the end of winter). And contrarily, the month so far has been quite an uneventful story for me for various reasons, and perhaps because of the main characters is off on a side quest for the past ten days.

Right now spring is like an unbloomed flower, ready to go but presently coiled and waiting. This made me think, too often I have taken photos of flowers but rarely of buds. So here's today's mood in picture form from the garden.

I spent the first three days of this week doing online training from 4:30pm to after midnight, along with online workshops every afternoon as well. This threw me back briefly into uni lifestyle, where I got to sleep in and take mornings easy. I also had bad facial hair because my Series 9 died and I had to wrap it in an old Amazon envelope and send it through the post for servicing. The main difference, other than how much I was paid for this week compared to twenty years ago, is that I was the international student. And yes, I did contribute to my group assignment.

This week nearly threw me all the way back into childhood, because I also spent the days riding bikes, playing games, bouldering, winning a quiz night, and playing putt putt. The only thing that prevented that was that the mini golf was booked out so we went and got ice cream instead.

Drove with Dad to Wilmington. Took the Germein Gorge road onto Survey Road up the back of Melrose, around sunset. A beautiful, rural valley canyon with many trees and red rocks and the silhouettes of sheep that I did not take any photos of and will probably forget about if I don't consolidate that thought here.

Alligator Gorge started with the worst coffee that I ever partially drank. Then a descent into the Gorge which was gorgeous in the early morning light and featured many tiny birds.

Dad and I looped anti-clockwise through the Gorge and then up onto the ridge. We followed the ridge road around until we got to the kingfisher track turn off, and we took a detour down that for a few kilometres past burnt scrub until we reached a little oasis camp ground with a mostly dry creek and some rocks in the shade to eat lunch on. I took probably the best photo of the day just sitting around eating my second sandwich while a large monitor lizard approached to drink from a puddle.

After lunch we reached the part called "The Narrows" which was also spectacular.

After 16 kilometres of trekking, we drove back to Wilmington to buy the double-strength iced coffee I'd been regretting not buying all morning at the servo. Unfortunately the servo was closed, but a standard FUIC from the vending machine down the street helped with the caffeine withdrawals a little bit.

After freshening up, we drove to Melrose for some beer and pizza at Jackas brewery, and the very attractive fire pit.

The night concluded with some milky way photography on the way back to the cabin, which this photo does not do justice.