May 31: Farewell Autumn 2014, you have been…

What an Autumn it has been.

Warm and sunny and lovely.

Climate change is here to see and really, as a city slicker who hates the freezing cold of winter I have enjoyed every sunny afternoon.

We have some old roses that we prune around this time of year - but not this year, they are still flowering and providing beautiful smelling blooms for the house.

These blooms would usually be long gone.

Autumn really is the month of natural beauty isn't it.

Spring may have its blooms, but autumn is where the fun is.

Autumn brings crunchy leaves, the relief of 45 degree days and bushfires that we had in the summer and still no freaking biting wind that we will be getting with the start of winter.


There was a sad moment this Autumn when I dusted off my favourite puffer coat and gave it a wash in the front loader. Don't do this if you have a down-filled puffer, it was straight to puffy heaven for that one. (You can dry them in the dryer with a tennis ball to try and get them back into shape though) I am now on the look out for a new one which, once purchased I will wear every day for the next 90 days of winter.


Autumn 2014 you have been pretty perfect.

May 30: Your favourite photo of the week from around the world

It's from right here in Melbourne from the local newspaper.

This is baby John, born at just 395grams at 26 weeks gestation, today he went home. After 165 days of dedicated expert care from the nursing staff, this family is finally spending the night together.

Can you imagine their excitement...and how slowly they drove home from the hospital.


  The full story is here.

May 29: A random act of kindness you have received or given.

It's a shame that this part of our lives has a title these days.

Some people tweeting or texting will even shorten it to RAK. As in " I just received/gave a RAK".

Thing is, if you just live your life dishing out random acts of kindness without thinking about the fact you are doing a random act of kindness than you will feel more of the benefits of being a random of act of kindnesser.

If you keep hoping and waiting for a random act of kindness to happen to you then you will never get one. Or you will, but you won't notice it.

You won't notice the driver who let you in, the person who held the door for you, the person who paid you a compliment, the hairdresser who got you a cup of tea, the friend who bought you a coffee, or just invited you over to her house to make you one. You won't realise it when a friend calls just to say hello or you get a card in the mail. But these are all everyday moments of kindness that make up a good life - for the giver and the receiver.

Don't think about it.

Just be Kind. All the time. And then a little more.

May 28: A habit I would like to break

I don't speak French. Minor detail.

I am thinking of getting a cleaner.

I've spent a great deal of time thinking about this cleaner, years in fact.

Mainly on Saturday mornings which is my time to race around and get the house perfect so that I can enjoy the rest of the weekend not thinking about cleaning the house.

Every Saturday morning the rest of the house prepares for me to start giving orders. I begin by telling them to pick things up, put things away, get their school bags onto the hooks and tennis racquets in the cupboard.

One room is delegated Mr H, I beg, plead and cross my fingers that he will actually clean it rather than sit in the room playing candy crush while he uses a tissue to wipe a bench and then declare the room 'DONE".

I have the washing machine spinning, the vacuum whizzing and the dishwasher loaded and at the end of it all I feel awful.

I feel like a nagging fish wife, screaming at everyone to just do their bit. I have hoped this habit would change, I have had hope that the rest of the household would start noticing maybe a shelf in the fridge with beetroot all over it might need a wipe, or that pulling out a table every now and then to vacuum behind it is useful.

Even the youngest members of the family know how to hide when Mum is in 'crazy cleaning mode'.

I can see only one way to break this habit. Paying a cleaner.

Perhaps that might be the way to break some habits around here.

May 27: Share a blog that you enjoy reading

The blogs I like to read most teach me nothing.

They don't tell me how to cook, clean, work, parent, eat clean, knit, grow herbs, quit sugar, run a marathon, wear fashionable clothes or ride a horse.

I do read lots of those too, but the ones I always go back to and never miss are just everyday people living everyday lives and doing stuff. I like to read their stories. I feel like they are friends in a creepy, never going to meet them, kind of way.

If you want to box them in with a label than they would be Personal bloggers or the "I have no niche bloggers".

If you don't know Mel from Coal Valley View you should pop over and say hello.

She blogs about her life in Tasmania with her five kids. She knits, she farms, she parents, she writes, she takes photos and some times she is in the local news regarding a huge project that I am watching quietly on the sidelines because it looks so fabulous.

So go on clickity click over to Mel's blog and say hello. 

Or see her on Instagram to just keep up with her wonderful photography.

What's another blog that you enjoy reading...I could really write quite a list, but love finding new ones. 

May 26: Are ghosts real?

One of the best tourist tours I have ever done, in fact probably only second to my Sound of Music tour in Salzburg, Austria, is the Fremantle Prison Torch Light tour.

I don't know why we ended up on the night time tour rather than a day time one, maybe we wanted to scare ourselves. But here we were, my sister and I in 1995 engrossed in one small part of our country's history. I don't think we had stuck so physically close to each other in many years.

The Fremantle Prison website is quite upfront about the tour including these words:

This experience involves a number of surprises and is not recommended for children under 10 or anyone with a weak heart or other health issues that may be aggravated by scares.

The prison only closed in 1991 so it was only a couple of years after this that I did the tour. I wasn't viewing something that was from 100 years ago, I was walking around a just closed prison.

The stories shared were historical but also of those still living, some in other prisons and some now out in the community.

We went through the morgue and we went to death row and the gallows where the rope was still hanging ready for the next person. There are cells with artwork covered walls and frames stained with blood were prisoners were flogged with a cat 'o'nine tails.

The last person hanged in 1964 was Eric Cooke, a serial killer who murdered an unknown number of people in Perth. After that, the community kept discussing whether or not capital punishment was something they wanted in our society until eventually it was abolished.

Yet there were still others that died within those walls, of natural causes or as the victims of prison life. Their deaths were not peaceful and painless.

And their ghosts remain there. 

There was a particular story about a female prisoner who has been showing her ghostly presence for decades. I can't recall her story or why she remained at the prison, but she is there.

With the right atmosphere, an experienced story teller, the wind blowing just right and the stars twinkling in the night sky, you just might see those ghosts for yourself.

However, it's important to note that ghosts can do nothing to the living.

May 25: You can be a fly on the wall at any time/stage of history, where do you go?

I keep re-writing this post because I just can't work out my answer.

I admit it, I am beaten by this prompt. There is no one place that I can choose to be.

I was thinking maybe some place in history but there are none I want to be a part of that are not horror filled.

I considered somewhere that would tell me the answer to a mystery, like who stole the Beaumont children, or Madeline McCann, but what would knowing and not being able to tell be like?

Then I decided it could be good to be in a room where you knew people were talking about you to hear what they really really thought. But then again, there is a reason they are talking about you with you not there.

I then spent all day thinking about it and weighing up where I could be and yet I give you nothing.

So I give up.

I have no answer.

Help me out, tell me where you would be a fly on the wall in history?

Image: I can't find the original source of this image, if it is yours please let me know so I can credit it. (I found it here)

May 24: The last book you read

I haven't quite finished this one yet. 

It isn't even a new book and the rest of the world may have read this a decade ago, but it is new to me. 

It kicks off with a man going blind with no reason at all, it's a different type of blindness, he can see white, not black. 

And the blindness is contagious. 

How does society deal with a virus that makes people instantly blind? What does the fear of the virus do to behaviour of usually normal people? 

I can't tell you how good it ends (or badly) or if the story stays so addictive the whole way through, but I do suggest you get this on your want to read list.