Into the new year we go

 Someone on a Facebook page for vintage paperbacks said to me "you seem to have read just about everything! I feel both admiration and envy!"

My response was it just seems that way. I did some research once and found the older a book was, the more likely I was to have read it. As we approached the present day, my strike rate sank to zero.

I was fortunate that my teenage years where I was reading almost constantly coincided with a wave of paperbacks in the 1960s that offered SF titles old and new at affordable prices. My notebooks of the time reveal I was consistently reading six paperbacks a week,month in and month out. (The average paperback in those days was seldom bigger than 192 pages, remember.) Under that set of circumstances, it was easy to cover the field fairly well !
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Got through Christmas without any drama.  I drove in for the morning service at church where we sang all the old favorite Christmas songs.  Home and had time to sit down down for a while before joining my niece Anita and her son for lunch in the city.

I had never been to the Crowne Plaza before - it was built after  I moved out of the city - and it has a deceptively small frontage (a bit like Doctor Who's Tardis).  We enjoyed a very pleasant meal, and I managed to stop eating just at the stage where I felt I could have eaten one more mouthful.  That's the time to stop!
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Tuesday I skipped the usual croquet morning and the evening quiz night,  so I had plenty of time to meet up with Dr Ali, my new medical adviser.  He had received the results from the scan I had early in the year.  Good news and bad news.  There was no sign of Problem A, which they had been looking for.  But they had noticed some signs of Problem B, so I have to go and see a specialist.  Sigh.   Oh well, better to get it done than not know about it at all.
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The television set hasn't been switched on since before Christmas.  Oh, I have watched a couple of movies on You Tube (seeing THE MONOLITH MONSTERS again was a real treat, haven't seen it in fifty years).   In the milder weather, I have been eating my meals out on the patio, and I have a new radio by the back door -- i was initially attracted to it because it has both a cassette deck and bluetooth, a hybrid of two different centuries.   This means I can listen to old radio shows while I eat.

Over the last couple of weeks, I've listened to HAVE GUN WILL TRAVEL, FRONTIER GENTLEMAN, THE HERMIT'S CAVE, THE HAUNTING HOUR, GANGBUSTERS, THE WHISTLER, ESCAPE, WILD BILL HICKOK, THE SEALED BOOK, DRAGNET, CHALLENGE OF THE YUKON, THE CISCO KID, and HOPALONG CASSIDY.