or so it seems. I've been here, in this unit, for almost a year, as the naked magnolia outside my balcony attests. It flowered not long after I moved in ( Read more... )

Today being a gorgeous autumn day, I actually managed to haul myself out of bed before 7am (the sunrise shines straight in my window) & walk the 2kms down the length of King St, north to south to Sydney Park. Not only that, I also walked up & down some of the bumps laughing known as 'hills' on this converted industrial wasteland, and enjoyed the ( Read more... )

This week I went down to the city to accompany my friend to her surgeon for her 12 month check-up after surgery for breast cancer. I had some spare time, so I went to the State reference library to follow up some earlier research on Newtown in 1978. This time I was cross-checking my information against the country's largest newspaper, (or 2nd ( Read more... )

I have spent pretty much the whole evening knitting, & am plumb knitted out. The pretty soft purple lace scarf is progressing well, but soo slowly, despite being worked on pretty much every evening. And invariably, at least once a night I have to tink back a row! It's those wretched yarn-overs - I either miss one or I do one too many! I had no ( Read more... )

Winter started with a vengeance this week, with gale force winds and heavy floods over much of the state. As well as coal tankers being driven onto the beach at Newcastle, threatening to spill fuel oil, there have been roads collapsing and flash flooding, which have resulted in the sort of holiday fatality figures we've come to expect from road ( Read more... )

Tonight I finished the cute baby hat and got about half a sock done. I did a whole sock last night in the same cotton the hat is made in - red with a green stripe, but it proved too bulky for the small diameter of the sock, so I ripped it all out. Luckily I found I still had some very fine baby merino I bought last year to knit a scarf with, and ( Read more... )

This afternoon I finished reworking two short stories to send off to the Shoalhaven Literary Award. I'm unlikely to win the big award, but one of the commendeds would be great. I've had to dig out two of my earlier stories because the word limit for this comp is only 3000, & the stories I've been writing over the past three years are in the 5000- ( Read more... )

Today was The One Day of the Year -- no, not Melbourne Cup, but Anzac Day, & as such, is a public (you could say religious, in a secular way) holiday. But us self-employed people can choose whether or not to take holidays, especially if a deadline is looming. So I spent the morning writing a rather delightful story about assistance dog puppies ( Read more... )

My newly updated website is now up & open for business, thanks to a lot of hard slogging on my part & even harder work & nifty tweaking by my very own webmaster J. I have learnt some new skills, particularly in using a mark-up language called -- Mark down! It figures! Among other things, I can now embed photos in the text versions of my articles ( Read more... )

But the only jokes & fishnet tights are in the last para.

(Apologies to my regular readers - this is for the lurkers or the once a year lookers. It's the circular letter that never got sent. Feel free to skip it. Or comment. Whatever.)

Yesterday was my last day at work for the year & (allowing for the vagaries of the editor of the American ( Read more... )