Apparently it's Valentines Day. Shops are (and have been for a while) full of advertising, love hearts made of chocolate/flowers/paper/cards/other stuff, and florists are doing a roaring trade. How could anyone miss it? When I was a child, I had no idea that Valentines Day was actually a thing. I remember my first reference to … Continue reading What’s All the Fuss About the 14th of February?
I'm sitting here in NSW, in a drought stricken town, refreshing my browser intermittently to check on the status of Townsville, in far north Queensland, where our daughter lives. It's so dry here that many of our local farmers have sold the vast majority of their stock. Our watercourses are dry, and the landscape fluctuates … Continue reading A Country of Contrasts
It was only yesterday that I watched the Gillette ad that's stirred up so much controversy. I've seen a lot of angst around social media about it, both from men and women. But I have to say, mostly from men. When I've seen women talk about it, it's mostly to share in positive terms. It's … Continue reading So Much Fuss About An Ad
We went to the beach today. It was boiling hot here, and there's no end to the heat in sight. Anyway, I've always been a bit of a swimwear conservative. You see, as a child/teenager, I swam competitively, which meant that most of my young swimming years were swum in one piece racing style swimwear. … Continue reading Swimwear Mysteries
On Friday night, we were waiting for our Uber, when we noticed the police helicopter circling above the centre of Melbourne, only two hundred or so metres away. The television in the hotel lobby showed aerial shots of a crashed car, multiple police vehicles, and patches of blood on the ground. Clearly something dreadful had … Continue reading Don’t Live in Fear
This week, Médecins Sans Frontiers, or Doctors Without Borders, was ordered to remove their mental health team from Nauru, where about 800 refugees, including 90 or so children, are being kept in offshore detention, at the behest of the Australian Government. There have been repeated, independent reports of the appalling conditions that these, already traumatised, … Continue reading A Message to Scott Morrison
I think a lot. In fact, there are people who'd say that it's possible I think too much. The thing is, there are so many things to think about, and so many things to discover and learn about. I hear something, so I look it up, and then I look up a bit more, and … Continue reading Contemplations
About six weeks ago, I wrote about the huntsman spider guarding her egg sack in our rain gauge. Since then, we've been away, it's rained a little bit (not enough to endanger the egg sack), and every day I've been out to check if the babies had arrived. I'd actually come to the conclusion that it … Continue reading They’re Here!
We've just arrived home from a two week holiday in New Zealand. It's been a few years since we've been there, and this time we went back for a family wedding, and then took off in a camper van (Wilderness Motorhomes are the best!) for nine days. We headed off to Hanmer Springs, and then … Continue reading The Resilience of People
Yesterday morning I got up and went outside to check the rain gauge. We'd had some rain forecast, and there had been a light sprinkle when we went to bed. It's been dry - really dry here. Total rain for 2018 - 120.8mm, compared to an average at this time of year of 395.6mm. Even … Continue reading Drought and Spiders
