Anyway, I thought it was time to bring my website up to date. After all, since I last posted anything significant on here, I have had two more books published and acquired a degree.
I have fallen in love with Vietnam and I am planning to lead a couple of tours there – one will be tightly related to Tunnel Rats and A Sappers War (my books with Sandy MacGregor) and the other will be much more about Vietnam as it is now. Â You can read about them HERE.
Somewhere along the line, I have become an ‘expert’ on apartment living – if the definition of expert is that I know where to find out the stuff that other people don’t know. Â The Sydney Morning Herald Flat Chat column is now has a Melbourne edition (the laws are very different so the columns usually are too) and I have started getting invitations to speak at conferences, which is cool as it scratches the itch that might otherwise have me foolishly try to do an open mike night at a stand-up club.
You’ll find the new, enhanced website here  http://www.flat-chat.com.au. That’s the place to be if you want to find the most recent examples of my trouble-making and attempts at problem solving in the area of strata living. After a blistering first year when I was getting about 1000  readers a day, it has settled down to a sensible 5-600, although it peaked one day when I had a story in the Herald’s online pages read by 123,000 people and at one point 518 people were all,  at the same time, reading the follow-up on my little website. What was the story? Whether ot not it was illegal to photograph someone’s illegally parked car.  Don’t ask!
Oh, and I finally acquired a university degree – an MA in writing from the Open University and Swinbourne in Melbourne. Â So I can now legitimately lecture about writing, as I occasionally do, to students who are less well qualified than I am. And, as part of my final submission, I wrote the first 20,000 words of a crime novel that I desperately want to finish but which has lain untouched ever since.
Time moves on so quickly. The kittens (below) who appeared the last time I revamped the website are now cats – one of them a ginger monster. And I have discovered a new desire – the desire to have done something (rather than wanting to actually do it). I’m calling it my Empty Bucket list. Â I would like to have run the City to Surf, I would like to have parachuted from an aeroplane and run for parliament. Â I have no desire to do any of these things in the future, I just think it would be cool if I had in the past.
And on that note, I wish I had started fixing up this website two years ago when those kittens were just fluffy little balls of fur.
Mac and Pepper at about 8 weeks
 Jimmy Thomson, December 2013
