It's months since I mentioned my weightloss journey, and everyone has been too polite to mention it, perhaps assuming that I'd irretrievably fallen off the wagon; NOT SO ( Read more... )

For the past nine years or so, we have been Barnados foster carers. Usually, we do respite care, where the children in the family stay with us for one weekend a month for 6-12 months, while people work with the family to resolve their problems. The first family we worked with had a severely disabled son, and were on a VERY long waiting list for ( Read more... )

In 1990, my golden retreiver died, and our little daschund Bridget was an only dog. That was fine for six months or so, until she started to dig holes to get under the fence so she could get out when the neighbourhod children came home from school; we realised that we needed to get her a friend. We thought of getting a small middle aged dog, but ( Read more... )

My aunt and one of my mother's friends are astrologers; both lovely ladies, and extremely comptetent in many things, but both quite loopy in others ( Read more... )

1. Like most institutions, the Churches have been exposed in recent years as having an appalling record regarding child abuse and their reaction to complaints. Sometimes that reaction has almost been worse than the original episodes. The whole thing has been quite disgusting, and, like most responsible organisations, the Anglican Church in ( Read more... )

It's some time since I posted and even longer since I mentioned that I am STILL losing weight. When I started, my goal was to lose 45Kg (99lb), which seemed an awfully long way away. Along the way, I have had great weeks, and not so great weeks. Just before Easter, I was ill for a couple of weeks, and had to take extra cortisone, and I actually ( Read more... )

I read this article and went into hysterical giggles ( Read more... )

I took my film camera to England, and Robert used his digital. We got all of my 12 films developed within a week or so of returning, and last week, we sat down with the 300 photos and the laptop, and went through all of the digitals and chose the 250 we actually wanted to print. Now I have to seriously work on my scrapbooks. There will be at ( Read more... )

We had a wonderful weekend at the Blue Mountains Music Festival. It started life ten years ago as the BM Folk Festival, but partly because of the crossover of artists between genres, partly because of the difficulty in classify some music, and partly because even folkies love other sorts of music, it is now for all sorts of music, except classical ( Read more... )

Robert went to New Zealand on Monday. It's quite amazing that someone can go to another country on a Monday and be back on the Thursday. The down side of working is that I couldn't go with him, as he only found out on Friday that he was going. If we'd had time, I would have enjoyed a few days in Christchurch ( Read more... )