Paw in the face

When I arrive home from work, the Prince is playing guitar on the verandah, and nods hello to me. He gets enormously distracted when playing, which occasionally drives me crazy, particularly when I’m trying to ask him a question. “Have you seen my blue shorts?” I’ll say, and stand there for 30 seconds [...]

Imitating expertise

Despite what this picture might suggest, I did not spend all weekend lying around in the sunshine. It was too hot, for one thing. The weather seems to have changed in a matter of weeks from lovely crisp end-of-winter temperatures to hot, muggy, christ-I-hate-summer temperatures. And it’s not even summer yet. We had an astonishingly [...]

Windfall (what falls from the wind?)

“What’s that?” said the Prince, nodding towards the package I’d picked up from the mailbox. “My makeup brushes from Ebay, I think,” I said (I’m taking this ‘doing my own wedding makeup’ thing very seriously). I ripped the package open, and tipped out a small box and a sheet of paper.
“Congratulations!” said the paper. “You [...]

I can hear music

Thanks to my father offering to pay for a band to play at our wedding reception (and me letting him do so - past experience has taught me that if I tell him I don’t want him to pay for something, he will just deposit money directly into my bank account and then refuse to [...]

Worth more

During a very positive performance review last week, I asked for and received a raise, something which has made me feel much more enthusiastic about my work and my position here. It’s not so much the money, although it will be nice to be getting a little more each fortnight, but the concrete acknowledgment of [...]

It’s simply divine, darling

On Saturday morning I went out for my inaugural trip in the boat, along with Prince Valiant and a picnic hamper with breakfast (boiled eggs for the Prince, waffles and maple syrup for me). It took me a little while to get the hang of driving the boat - every time I turned the [...]

A musical weekend

After going shopping for a new suit yesterday (and buying the first one I tried on, as it both fit and was heavily discounted - very serendipitous), I went off to the matinee performance of Women in Voice 15. WIV is a bit of a Brisbane institution, running as it has done for 15 [...]

But no-one else watches Battlestar Galactica

“And what do you like to read?”
I hate that question. In my experience, it’s generally posed by people who don’t read much themselves, which makes it all the more difficult to answer. Whenever I’m asked a question of that variety - my favourite book, my favourite band - my mind goes completely blank. [...]

Lennon fighting for peace

I was dozing in front of the TV last weekend, having concluded that the series I had begun watching because I was intrigued by the ads (Murder in Suburbia) was not really worth my time. Prince Valiant turned on a documentary about John Lennon instead ( Imagine, I think it was called.) The [...]

How The Beatles betrayed me

The Prince and I have been watching 80s music clips on the TV over the past few weeks (thanks to the Music Max channel), which has been an interesting cultural experience for me. As I grew up without a television, I didn’t really become involved in pop culture until I was about 15 - [...]