Anyone who arrives home from holidays can be forgiven for wistfully looking over their photos of their time away and, having done so, head straight to the internet to check on their points status to see when they might be able to go away again. I think they can be forgiven because that’s exactly what…
I’ll start off this week’s celebrations with the above picture. Readers might recognise this poem ‘postcard’ from my #miscpoetry project – if you click through to the link you’ll see them all in a single post. Since then, they’ve been sitting in my drawer and I thought to myself, “What else can be done? How can I…
What am I celebrating this week? Enjoying watching the kids draw chalk pictures on our driveway. The Sydney Writers Festival podcasts of Helen Garner and Richard Flanagan. It’s a joy to listen to them both. Gmail is now officially offering ‘Undo Send’ functionality, and users like me everywhere breathe a sigh of relief….
In wanting to write this post, I’ve found myself at a crossroads. The number of times I’ve chosen to tell stories about the kids over recent years has dwindled, and this has been a deliberate decision. Of course, I could tell many, many more, but I am conscious of their opinions and worry about…
Every Friday during school term, Riley sits down to eat his breakfast and you can almost guarantee that while he’s eating will say at least once, “Friday! It’s almost the weekend! I love Fridays.” In that same celebratory spirit, I thought I would start up a regular ‘Friday Celebrations’ series, showcasing the sorts of links,…
Dear Karen, On behalf of the Australian Government and the Minister for Veterans’ Affairs, we are very pleased to inform you that your application for a double pass to attend the Anzac Day Dawn Service at Gallipoli on 25 April 2015 has been successful. You might recall my post from a year ago announcing my…
This is the Piazza del Popolo (the “People’s Square”) and it was at this moment when Rome and I finally ‘clicked’. I am high up on a balcony at the edge of the Villa Borghese. We’d had a fairly disappointing time until that point, but after a refreshing morning in the Villa’s gardens I was starting to…
I admit to feeling a slight… ambivalence… as to what laid in store for us in Rome. It’s been on my Living List since studying the Judio-Claudian emperors in ancient history and watching old movies a child, all those ‘sandal and toga’ epics, full of fighting and chariot races. And, of course, I wanted to eat the…
We were in Dubai when news of the first devastating earthquake in Nepal started to hit the television. I mentioned this over on my Facebook page, but I remember sitting there at breakfast at our five-star, sipping my coffee and nibbling on a danish pastry, watching BBC World, feeling out-of-place, helpless, even guilty. I am…
