It was supposed to be an all-girls chill-out – just my best friend and me, but the boys decided they wanted to come, too, so we booked flights and headed off to meet in Cairns, FNQ (Far North Queensland). Pete and I left on a respectable 10am flight. We had a slight scramble at Brisbane…
When I first saw the news about the fire destroying the spire of Notre Dame de Paris I was sickened, appalled, and ultimately grief-stricken. My post on Facebook said it all – “Notre Dame. Oh no, oh no, how tragic”. Although I was raised in a Christian (Protestant) household, I have been for many years…
Everybody who uses the internet has heard about how Facebook collects private information and uses it to target advertising. Nobody likes it, especially when email addresses and telephone numbers are sold off to other parties. I’m with you – something needs to be done to prevent this abuse but if it’s a choice between giving…
It seems it’s baby boomer bashing time again. Apparently us old farts are increasingly a drain on the national purse. We don’t pay tax and we want pensions and healthcare. All those poor young people earning wages and paying tax right now are forking out for us. We’re an undeserving burden. And we shouldn’t come…
I used to haunt bookshops. I loved them, aiming invariably for the fantasy and science fiction aisles and maybe the crime aisles. Oh, and the cookbooks. And anything else that took my fancy. I’d pick up anything that attracted my interest and read the blurb, then maybe a few pages before I decided whether to…
I’m delighted to be able to report that we have been rained upon – nice, gentle, soaking rain which can continue on for longer if it wants. Encouraged by the 30mm or so we’d had before, I planted a cutting that I’d had under shelter, developing roots. The plant had a good root ball –…
I wrote this post before we heard about what happened in Christchurch, New Zealand, yesterday. People were murdered while worshiping at mosques.Once again, it was a white supremacist male picking a soft target to vent his hatred. Gunning people down at any place of worship is particularly gutless and ugly, every bit as gutless and…
It was International Women’s Day yesterday in Australia (8th March). I’m a woman. When I was a teenager I recall taking a different route walking home to avoid having to pass the construction site and the wolf whistles and crude remarks of the tradesmen. I’ve had to work out what I was going to do…
Around Christmas 2018 Australian news sources were full of articles about the suppression of news about a ‘high profile Australian’ who had been involved in a court case. Since the news was only suppressed in Australia, it didn’t take much investigation to come up with the name Cardinal George Pell. For my non-Australian readers, Pell…
This “wet season” has turned out to be a pretty dry season. No, a VERY dry season. In previous posts I’ve mentioned we had 1mm of rain in January. So far in February the rain gods have managed 35.5mm, which is slightly less than two tenths of bugger all in this part of the world….