May 2009

Emerging Writers’ Festival here I come!

May 29, 2009

In a few short hours I will be bidding my family adieu for the Emerging Writers’ Festival. What am I doing again, you ask? Here’s a reminder: The revolution will be downloaded Saturday 30th May 3 to 4pm Melbourne Town Hall In this age of electronic enlightenment there are so many ways for writers to [...]

News Flash: past and present collide and leave mother, 30 yrs old, terrified

May 28, 2009

Back in March, Keira was promoted a level in her gymnastics class; a class I’d secretly been hoping she’d be put into because it was in the ‘Big Person’ gym, seemed all fancy-like, and I guess I saw an excuse for me to put on my “WARNING: EXTREMELY BRAGGARTY PARENT” bumper stick on the back of [...]

What I’m reading, 4th week in May 2009

May 27, 2009

While my years of learning German in school are fast fading behind me and are getting spotty in my memory, Keira likes to go over the basic words and is interested in how some of our words are spelled and said the same, how some are spelled the same and yet pronounced differently, and how some [...]

And for 48 hours, I had a plan.

May 26, 2009

I have quite an imagination at times. Not as much as I’d like, though. I would like to be one of those people who has a television in the house but never turns it on, leaving their ‘down-time’ to other mentally stimulating practices like reading and doing crossword puzzles. But, no, I like plonking myself [...]

News and Links

May 25, 2009

Do you remember my grandfather who I asked to keep in your thoughts three weeks ago as he’d just had investigative surgery into potential prostate cancer? Well this 81 year old man was helping his neighbour brand cattle during the week (as you do when you’ve been ill) and a black and white heifer turned on [...]

Overland magazine and my son

May 23, 2009

A nice companion picture to this. In decades to come, when I’m sure my children will accuse me of some parenting failure or another, at least I’ll be able to say, “Well you can’t say I* didn’t expose you to a bit of culture.” *I say ‘I’ but really the thanks goes to my friend [...]

Autumn colours and winter gardening

May 22, 2009

This is our next door neighbour’s tree. I can’t be sure, but I suspect it is either a Japanese or Canadian maple? What I am sure about is how I adore the colour it turns in autumn and how too soon the leaves fall off. Look, you can already see naked branches at the top. [...]

No-one expects the Spanish (education) Inquisition

May 21, 2009

Right. So. This is a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while, if only to set straight in my own head what we’re going to do next year with Keira: specifically, which primary school will we send her to? And oh, lordy. What a Pandora’s box opens. I first suspected this would be a [...]

Kitty love

May 20, 2009

The spectacular lack of intelligence – and examples thereof – of our cat will have to wait for another day. Suffice to say at the moment with the kind of squeezing it gets from my son and daughter, I think we can put the deficiency down to lack of oxygen to the brain.