Sometimes I have to send letters to school, in order to help teachers deal with my offspring. Here are a couple of examples I found when I was clearing out old correspondence from my files.

Letter The First, Concerning An Unusual Lunch

Dear E---

No, the addition of cold porridge to Jake’s lunch is not an attempt to recreate some kind of ( Read more... )

So, Sydney and the Blue Mountains and large chunks of NSW are in deep trouble from bushfire, earlier than ever before. Brisbane is breathless, hot and dry except when the hailstorms sweep down out of the west. Summer has come early to most of Australia, it would seem.
Not so much down here. It's been cool and rainy since... actually, I can't ( Read more... )

Well, I'd better face up to it. I'm going to have to build a proper website, get myself a domain, go through all that shite. I'm going to have to centralise and link together my various web presences once and for all.

Why?

Because of this:

http://www.amazon.com/Path-Night-Beast-Dirk-Flinthart-ebook/dp/B00G0PI82G/

That would be the link to my first ( Read more... )

Ouch.

Look, the operation itself was nothing much. Couldn't have taken more than half an hour. When they walked me out to the recovery area, there was another bloke in a one of the chairs, having a bit of a laugh at my mushy efforts to talk through the fast-fading sedatives. Maybe twenty minutes later, he was gone -- and they walked another bloke ( Read more... )

I thought long and hard about publishing this one, but I think it needs to be done.

I don't consider myself any kind of leader type, nor a figure to be emulated. But I do think that the women's movement has empowered women and created a system which increasingly is driven by, and supportive of, what are perceived to be values associated with women ( Read more... )

This one is... interesting. I thought long and hard before I wrote this, but in the end, it comes to this: I've discussed this issue with the school. I've taken it just as far as I can reasonably take it. And the school has told me in no uncertain terms that they're not interested, and not concerned -- and so I see no reason why I can't talk about ( Read more... )

Well, we had a good run.

We got onto the Vitamin D supplement thing, and this winter, the kids had a great run. Not so much as a cough or a sniffle. All the way into early spring, clear as clear could be.

But with one thing and another, somehow Nat and I fumbled the ball, and we forgot to keep reminding the kids about the Vitamin D. Meanwhile, a ( Read more... )

Some time in the dim dark ages of the 70s, there was an ugly election in Afghanistan, and the government that resulted therefrom wound up "calling in Soviet help". Without looking up details, my recollection -- as a child of about twelve -- has it that essentially, the Soviets manipulated events to provide them with a pretext to invade Afghanistan. ( Read more... )

Every now and again I run across a chunk of software which is just so damned clever and useful that I latch onto it, and keep it for years. I still do a lot of drafting in a thing called Yeah Write, for example. Reason being that it's the only word processor I've ever seen in which the user interface is deliberately designed to look like, and work ( Read more... )

Quite some time ago, I picked up a Charlaine Harris book to read on a flight. I did it because everybody was talking about her "Sookie Stackhouse" books, and the tv series True Blood which grew therefrom.

I admit it. I was hoping to enjoy what I read.

I didn't, though. I found Harris' writing pedestrian and predictable, and the main character -- ( Read more... )