Who am I?

I am a writing and publishing guru. What I dont know about the market just isn't worth knowing. So what if I'm unpublished? I choose to give other writers the gift of my wisdom and experience* that the other 500,000 writing blogs out there fail to give.
* No actual experience

Saturday, December 24, 2011

Dreaming of a white one?

Christmas comes in the middle of summer here. Some insist on forcing down a roast lunch with all the trimmings, but many are conceding that in hot weather, this is a tad masochistic.

We had a barbecue lunch followed by platters heaped with watermelon, mangoes, cherries and stone fruit. Summer fruit....my idea of heaven, bury me now.

I’ve certainly had hotter Christmas days than today, it reached 30 Celsius (that’s 86 Fahrenheit) in Melbourne. But it was so humid and muggy that, well, lots of rehydration was needed. We were all quite merry, in a sluggish, laid-back way! Even the energy balls kids were lethargic. Or maybe their shenanigans didn’t bother us.

Then at 3:00PM a storm swept through the city. The temperature plummeted and I initially thought drunken revellers were chucking stones. As it turned out, it wasn’t human hands – those cloud-dwelling creatures were. We had hail.

Golf-ball sized chunks of ice bombarded the yard. Some bounced off the neighbour’s roof into our courtyard. As we’d covered the courtyard ground with recycled rubber matting, the hailstones bounced around the small space, some smashing spectacularly against the house wall. It looked like the inside of a popcorn maker. Within minutes, the ground was white. 

The kids’ excitement was short lived as they discovered that getting pelted with ice actually hurt. We stressed over the cat’s whereabouts, but when it was over she sauntered in, her fur completely dry.

But all those dreaming of a white Christmas got one.

Hope you guys got what you wanted, too.

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

just an observation

The word “hysteria” means “womb” (just think of the word hysterectomy, if you don’t believe me).

Yep, way back when the study of mental health was in its infancy in the last century, it was deemed that such irrational, uncontrolled excessive emotional behaviour was purely feminine. So it was plainly obvious to the learned gentlemen that its origin must be in the uterus.

First coined in the days of Hippocrates, and largely forgotten, Freud repopularised the term and wrote several serious papers about it. Thanks, Sigmund – it obviously wasn’t enough that we were supposed to envy those other things.