Musings on a Life Quite Ordinary

Have you ever had one of those moments with your child when they do or say something and you just know they learned it from you.   Whether you directly or indirectly taught them or they were born with the knowledge deep in their DNA doesn’t matter. This moment was a case of monkey see, monkey do: This is my eldest child on her Dora the Explorer lap top at our kitchen table, if you look to the top of the photo, you’ll see my lap top in a place it spends as much time as I can find during our busy week to use it. I took the photo without realising what I was looking at until afterwards.   She’s just copying me right?   I suppose so, but it felt like a lot more than that to me. I’m a writer, I’m still mostly blogging, but as soon as the kids are old enough to give me more time, my plan is to go for it.   I want to blog more, I want to write a book, I want to write articles, I want to reach people with my words and leave the world a tiny bit better than I f...

Happy Valentines Day everybody.   Whether you like it or not, it’s here and it ain’t going nowhere until midnight tonight. Many years ago when my other half and I got together Valentines was such a big deal.   The pressure to go to some awful restaurant and pay too much money for factory churned out food was enormous.   As was the pressure to get the perfect card, perfect gift, decide whether or not getting a box of helium balloons delivered to his office was a good idea (the jury is still out on that one). In 2001, my wish list for Valentines Day would have read something like this: 1.        Breakfast in bed. 2.       Flowers 3.       Some other present that was just for me, perfume, chocolates etc. 4.       Candle lit dinner for two. 5.       An early night - eh hem. Nowadays things are a little different.   We have children, so I ...

I live in a relatively rural area, so driving is pretty much a necessity.   My daughter’s school is a few kilometres away and every morning we have a beautiful drive across a wide open plain that we’re lucky to live close to. It is a simply stunning place and sprawls to the horizon with all the romance of a Bronte novel, without the angst. Look at it.  It's beautiful. Being so far reaching and flat, the plain is prone to fog.   Not a surprise.   The speed limit is 60 kmph, sensible enough, yes?   Therefore my ever increasing irritation with certain plonkers who drive across it like they’re taking part in a Grand Prix is, I believe, understandable. Take the Dolly Bird I encountered this morning.   There she was driving her rather large car well above the speed limit while chatting on her phone which was clenched between her jaw and shoulder. Like I said earlier, this area is prone to fog and this morning, visibility wasn’t great.   So, d...

I recently got a letter from my daughter’s teacher.   It was a note really, but it was on a page and hand written with blue pen.   I needed to respond and am ashamed to say my first reaction was not what I would have expected from a word lover like myself. I checked my phone to see if I had her number so I could text her, I didn’t, so I checked the contact list to see if I had her email address.   I did not have that either. Finally, the penny dropped and I realised I needed to actually write back to her.   As in get a note pad and a pen and write a note. I used to write letters and notes all the time, right up until I was introduced to email way back when it was still new.    I remember thinking it wouldn’t catch on.   I thought the same about text messaging.   That’s why I won’t ever speculate on the stock market. If you’ve read one of my recent posts, you’ll know that of late, I’ve become quite obsessed with all things technical.   P...