My dad turns 80 tomorrow. Yep, the big 8-0. Wow that makes me feel old … I can’t even begin to imagine how it makes him feel! I’ll be wishing Dad a happy birthday via Zoom or some other new-fangled thing. He only lives two hours away in Newcastle, but I haven’t seen him since […]

You’ll be pleased to hear I don’t think I’ll die of alcoholism. I’m not sure I ever had the capacity for it, but it appears to be completely out of the question at age 52. I don’t have the stomach for excessive consumption of booze. A tipple, on the other hand, can be quite fun. […]

The youngest was meant to perform her solo routine at the World Skipping Championships in Ottawa yesterday. It popped up in my phone calendar: “CANCELLED: Junior World Skipping Championships”. We were supposed to drive to New York tomorrow to fly to Hawaii for a week. No aloha for us. Damn you, COVID-19. We had a […]

My heart is hurting – I lost a good friend over the weekend. Her name was Lorrae Joy Willox. She was only 68 years old when she passed away, which is far too young to be gone. I didn’t know her middle name was Joy until yesterday and I cried when I found out because […]

DD sent me a picture of his younger self last week and I’ve been staring at it on and off ever since. I’ve decided that while the concept of a younger him is exciting, I prefer the silver fox version. I try to imagine being in a relationship with the fresh faced fellow in the […]

My dishwasher is kaput. My knight in jeans and a black hoodie – aka DD – arrived yesterday morning to try and fix it. He ended up calling the manufacturer and got it working. But halfway through the cycle it went on the blink again. Cue another round of bailing the bloody thing out with […]

Was anyone else a little freaked out by the PM’s announcement that he was beefing up Australia’s defence capabilities by spending $270 billion to protect us in the “dangerous“ post-COVID-19 world? Far out it unsettled me. “We have not seen the conflation of global economic and strategic uncertainty now being experienced here in Australia, in […]

I forgot to tell you – a burly family popped over to my house on Saturday, hefted my art deco lounge suite into a trailer and drove it away. One of the blokes was so burly he simply wrapped his arms around an armchair, straightened up and strode out the door with it. The family […]

I took a half day off on Friday and another on Monday, so I’m a bit frantic catching up on work. I’m keeping the words in this blog post to a minimum and sticking to the visuals. Since we last spoke, DD took an arty fireside whisky photo for me for The Thirsty Travellers: Click […]

I shouldn’t be shocked by this news, but I am: Qantas chief Alan Joyce reckons we won’t be travelling internationally until July next year. And I think by “internationally” he means New Zealand. Joyce said yesterday that the “travel bubble” with New Zealand has progressed, but access was unlikely until 2021. “(For) international, we have […]