June 2010 Blog Posts (20)

The first steps in making my backyard desert bloom were exciting. After only four or five days, the white Sweet Alice (alyssum) was flourishing. I felt as though you could almost watch it grow and already its honey perfume was a distinctive aroma in the late afternoon. To…

Beyond the kangaroo paw and red gum, the back garden bed stretches away to the left. It is a desert of grey, sad looking sand. A couple of tough Easter Lilies have managed to survive there and they are indeed an excellent symbol of what is needed: a resurrection; a restoration…

In our backyard, there is a long narrow garden bed that runs the length of the back fence. The fence itself is a horrible mess of sheets of corrugated iron, painted in various shades of green, with hundreds of nail holes of various sizes and undisclosed origins.

A couple of years ago, just before Christmas when it was 40c in the shade, my Dad and I sweated away to cover the fence with bamboo screens. It improved the view immensely and…

During the school holidays, I will be presenting some workshops for children on writing stories, at Tresillian in Nedlands. Right now, I am supporting Save Our Marine Life with a display in our local library. The local newspaper gave us good coverage.

SOML…

In the middle of June, 2010, the senior advisor to the Rudd Federal Government in Australia resigned because he felt that the issue of mental health was not being addressed by the Governnment as promised in their election campaign and in follow up discussions.

Getup - a community based organization in Australia set up a campaign to endorse his concerns and put it back on…

Biodiversity Events - 2010

Searching in the Deep Seas of the Southwest

Starts:…

Today, I received this very impressive email at one of my usual email addresses. Happily, a quick check through Google Wikipedia entry on Cambridge Who's Who saved my vanity from separating me from my wallet.

Watch out for this one - it is definitely a scam.

I did not click the "unsubscribe" link either. No point in validating my email address to them.…

Dear Senator Pratt

Like many Australians, I am distressed and disappointed that the Rudd Government has not provided adequate funding and resources to improve the services available in the area of Mental Health. Mr. Rudd promised that he would get more funding and better services in this area.

My beautiful daughter committed suicide at the age of 34 - a deeply loved wife and mother of two lovely children. She…

Twitter has introduced me to a whole range of friends who speak languages other than English. Especially Spanish and Italian. After feeling highly uneducated and ignorant, I have decided to do something about it.

On this network, I have set up two groups:

#LearnItalian

and…

WOW - you can't be too careful these days.

My email was down while we repaired some problems that were allowing spam to come to an old domain name and in the meantime, an email address to me at this website came into the email box. I picked it up by webmail and forwarded it to myself where I could deal with it, on the PC.

Just as I was about to forward it on to a business that I thought would profit from…

This article The Awl - June 2010 was tweeted widely today, advising that The New York Times had banned the use of the word "tweet" in reference to amything to do with Twitter.

Along with many others, I could not resist the urge to comment on their pedantic approach to use of the English language. Google picked up my…

Keep Some Space In Your Twitter World…

It has been almost a month since I wrote Part 3 of this ongoing saga and for new readers, I provide the links to make it easy for you to bring yourselves up to date.

Part 1 - The Server is Dead

Part 2 -…

My favourite brand of milk is Harvey Fresh - a local dairy business set in the South West of WA on the way to Margaret River. My favourite packaging of their milk is the one litre bottle. It seems to me to be more creamy and have a flavour that I remember from long ago. When we were young, the milk lady used to bring the milk around on her horse and cart. Her name was Maria, I think. She was Italian and, to my mind at the time, all…

My family used to live in Big Bell, a gold mining town in the middle of Western Australia. In the summer, my father played Country Week Cricket and one year we went with some other families to Busselton on the coast. We stayed at the caravan park and we all went fishing, crabbing and played on the beach. The water was crystal clear; you could see the crabs twenty feet below your boat and the beach was covered with thousands of iridescent sea…

I am 66 yrs old and have travelled around the world a couple of times on my own. Widowed now for eight years; one great adventure was when I was returning from a trip to Hawaii and I came home to Perth via Queenstown in NZ. I went 4 wheel driving; did a bungy jump; flew over the Incredible Mountains in a helicopter and landed on a glacier. Then I came back from Milford sound in a single engine…