Week 16/2026: On the road to New Norfolk
Week of 13 April 2026
A little road trip!
AI-Free zone. This post is wholly researched and written by me. I do not use AI in my writing. I will always bring you my stories in my real human voice.
A day trip to New Norfolk
Lil Sis and I had been talking about taking a trip to New Norfolk for months. We both had vouchers for our favourite store, Flywheel and kept asking each other when we were going to go.
On Saturday, we finally did it.
We checked out the remains of the old Bridgewater Bridge on the way.
And the new one.
And we’d forgotten that the New Norfolk Market is on Saturdays and the place was very busy.
Rocks!
Besides Flywheel, it’s compulsory to visit the Big Tasmanian Rock Shop on any visit to New Norfolk, and that’s where we went first. Kramstable and I used to go in there a lot when this shop was located in the main street but I’m not sure if I’d actually been into this location. (So much for it being a compulsory stop.)
If I had, I’d forgotten how big this place is. There’s room after room after room of rocks, including a glow in the dark room.
Cool? Yes.
There are some beautiful specimens from all over the world, including Tasmania, and it was hard to restrict myself to just a few.
My rock shelf at home is looking somewhat more expanded now (and there are more since this photo as I remembered I had two others sitting in a downstairs room with no home. Now they have one.)
Flywheel
Then we headed to Flywheel for our main mission for the day. That was a lot of fun, and we took a lot of time deciding which of the gorgeous products we would actually use rather than purchase and sit on a desk somewhere and feel guilty for not using. (I, of course, have never done that. I’ve used every notebook I’ve ever bought …….. )
After we’d decided, we had a bit of time before we had to leave. On the way back to the car we browsed through Flywheel’s sister stores The Drill Hall and Miss Arthur before heading home in time for me to be off the road (almost) before the hoppy animals started coming out for the night.
Thanks, Lil Sis for driving me. It was a fun day!
Habit tracker
- 15 minutes morning exercise sequence (7 days): 5/7
- Hip or shoulder sequence exercises (5 days): 2/5
- Walk (7 days): 5/7
- Thinking time (4 days): 4/4
- Morning planning routine (4 days): 0/4
- Mid-day journalling (7 days): 1/7
- Work shutdown (4 days): 0/4
- 9.30 shutdown (6 days): 6/6
- Evening routine (7 days): 7/7
Summary of the week
Some positive things
I saw a picture of Salisbury Cathedral in England and it reminded me of the John Constable print that hung in the lounge room of my childhood home. And I got interested in the painting and the cathedral and I found out that they have a peregrine falcon pair at the cathedral and it has not one but three webcams!
They have four eggs!
Excitement!
This week I learned
Coprolite is fossilised poo.
This week I noticed
A plover near the soccer ground.
It looked like it had been disturbed from its territory because there’s usually a pair of them that hang out on the ground itself. I don’t know where the other one was, but this one was sitting down to watch the game.
What’s making me think?
What’s the point
I did a quiz on Tom Rath’s website, which is promoting his new book What’s The Point: Turning purpose into your daily superpower.
I own a couple of Tom’s previous books including Eat Move Sleep, which is about building basic habits to eat better, move more and sleep enough, and Strengthsfinder 2.0, which its the basis of the Clifton Strengths profile that I did many years ago and did some coaching on in 2023.
The book’s blurb says that it shows how “your daily superpower isn’t your title, your salary, or your ‘brand’. It’s your ability to contribute to others”. And, without having read it, I imagine that the quizzes on Tom’s website help you identify the ways which you might be able to use your strengths and interests in a way that contributes to others.
You know I love stuff like this, so I went in and did one of the quizzes. It asks a heap of questions about what you’re good at, what your strengths are, how you like to work. The final question was something about what is the greatest problem that the world needs to deal with, and I responded “the existence of billionaires”.
It did its little calculations and told me I could be a writer, an academic researcher or a content creator and that I am “someone who uses the precise craft of language to make invisible systems visible, helping everyday people understand—and challenge—the structure that concentrates power and wealth”.
Nice.
And then . . .
Unrelated, but I can’t stop thinking about this. It is so weird that you can go into a shop and buy the fossilised shit of a long-dead animal.
Reading
- Dracula by Bram Stoker
- Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare
- William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Mean Girls by Ian Doescher
Watching
- Resident Alien
- Doctor Who ‘Fury from the Deep’
- Deadloch
Listening
- The World Is To Dig (They Might Be Giants)
- Handel: Concerti Grossi, Op. 3 (Van Diemen’s Band)
- Gottfried Finger: The complete music for viola da gamba solo (Petr Wagner & Ensemble Tourbillon)
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