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 |   The simplicity of my day to day. |
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This is where I write my thoughts, feelings and my daily trials, tribulations and happy things
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| We're one month into 2025, what are your thoughts on the year thus far? 2025 seems to be exactly the same as 2024. The ramifications of the election of a new President of the USA are yet to unfold. Although I live in Australia, I feel President Trump’s decisions have the potential to have widespread effects. We are experiencing extreme weather conditions here. Floods, record temperatures and terrible fires have caused havoc and loss. I wish I could be more optimistic for 2025 but I can’t. Here in my country, far right radical groups are targeting the Jewish communities. Anti semitism is on the increase which is very unsettling and I’m not confident of a better future. Personally the year so far has been a very mixed bag. The bright spark has been travelling a very long distance to visit family. I didn’t think I would be well enough to make the four flights and five hour drive, but I did it! So happy I did and was able to bond with my little grandson. Writing took a definite back seat for weeks. Everything here comes to a halt in the Summer. All classes, whether it be choir or my writing group, close for eight weeks, so it seems as if I’ve been marking time. Even WdC has failed to inspire but I’m hoping I get my mojo back and can start writing again in February. |
| Use these words in your entry: February, love, hope, and joy. February is the hottest month here in Western Australia. It’s also the month the children return to school for the start of the new school year. I always feel so sorry for them. After seven weeks of freedom, no homework, or studying, only to have to spend weeks of temperatures in the high thirties, sitting in the classroom. I suppose they’ll all hope for a good year with great teachers. My school years were dreadful. I started school the day I turned four and left on my fifteenth birthday. The year was 1948. Teachers back in those days were to be feared and they certainly were. There was little joy. We all sat in rows, up to forty in a class, so different to how schools are today. However there was discipline. No one dared say anything out of line to the teachers for fear of reprisals. But my great grandchildren love school and are great learners which is wonderful. My eldest great granddaughter is in her final years at high school and wants to be a scientist, this certainly isn’t something which was available to me in those far off school years. |
Prompt: Imagine lacking something that everyone else has, something that proves you belong to the world. Something so vital....let's see what comes to mind... What immediately comes to my mind are other people. Imagine being a Tom Hanks character, castaway on an island. There’s no one else. No one to talk to! Having had that thought about words and conversation, it makes me wonder if one would even have the ability if there was no one else to speak to? But just imagine if you weren’t just a castaway but there were actually no other people existing in the world besides you. You wouldn’t want to live, there’d be no point to life. I suppose that’s an extreme answer to the question. Second choice.: Clothes! Imagine being the only person in the world not to have anything to wear. Now that’s sure to make a person feel as if they’re not a part of society. Although one never knows, it could set a trend! |
Have fun with these words: serendipity, sparkle, ramble, facts, ghosts, harness, and couch.
The sparkle and glare from the hot Queensland sun reflects into my eyes and I reach for my sunglasses and pull my large-brimmed hat even further down my face. On vacation, visiting family in Far North Queensland at the absolute hottest time of the year, my thoughts ramble. I remininice about the time when my babies were the same age as this little grandson I’m holding in my arms. The memories are like ghosts and it seems as if that time when I was a young mother, over fifty years ago, never really happened; I feel like a completely different person. I attempt to harness anecdotes and facts about my kid’s childhoods and relate them over dinner with my adult children, who are together with me in the same city location for the first time for many years. It is simply serendipitous we’re all here in Cairns together for a few days. After many failed attempts to reunite, it just seemed to just happen that everyone was available in 2025 to spend a weekend away from their work and responsibilities with their siblings and mother. When I’m back home in Perth I’ll sit on the couch with my husband, who’s not well enough to make the journey, and I’ll try to make him feel as if he’d been there with us with photos and videos. But it won’t be quite the same. |
If you could change anything about yourself physically what would you change? Why? If I had been asked this question when I was much younger I could have given you a list. In my plumper days I’d have wanted to be thinner. After I’d had my babies I desperately hated my stretch marks. My hair has always been frizzy and when I was a teenager I would have given anything to have sleek, straight, smooth hair. Of course being 80 years old the list is different, and all to do wth physicality. I’d change my arthritic left foot for a new one for a start. I like to get rid of a few wrinkles, and my extremely thin skin caused from having to take steroids daily would definitely be changed to nice smooth thick skin. So I’ve learned to accept my crooked teeth as part of my look, at least they’re all mine. My stretch marks are a reminder of my pregnancies and my hair actually is easier to deal with than the flyaway straight hair I desired so long ago. |
Have fun with these random words: thirteen, mistakes, frequency, radical, abundant, grinch, and koalas. It’s difficult to write today with all the terrible news of the devastating loss of people’s homes in the fires. I think mistakes must have been made for such a catastrophe to happen, although I realise after the weeks and months of drought the resulting abundance of dry fuel exacerbated the fires. It was a reminder of the fires we experienced here in Australia when people from around the world sent money towards the recovery. The vision of a Koala drinking from a fireman’s drink bottle went viral. That image showed the plight of the koalas, when their habitat was destroyed, better than any words. I’m sure everyone will be prompted to put their hands in their pockets and send donations for those poor souls who have lost everything. Even the Grinch’s ice cold heart would surely be touched by the disaster. The frequency of forest fires is increasing as the earth warms. Climate change is upon us, the clock is chiming thirteen. and the LA fires are a stark reminder of what’s to come unless we all take responsibility and do something radical to turn things around. |
Prompt: "If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear." George Orwell Is it easy to tell people something, about anything, that they do not want to hear? And which kinds of things do you think people wouldn't want to hear even if what is said may be the truth or to their benefit? It is so hard to tell people what you think they should hear. No one likes to be told they’re making the biggest mistake or doing the wrong thing, after all none of us are perfect. I had to do this only this week and it was so hard to do and emotionally draining. When it’s someone you love and care for it’s doubly difficult. My granddaughter, the mother of four children, suffers from poor mental health which is exacerbated by alcoholism. She recently spent seven weeks in a psychiatric hospital followed by eleven weeks in a rehabilitation centre. The programme was going well, her children were being taken to visit her weekly and we had plans to help her get her life back on track when she finished the rehab programme in just four more weeks. It was on Thursday when she rang my daughter, her mother, and told her she was leaving rehab and asked if she could she stay with her. My daughter was furious with her and told her to stay where she was. Then my granddaughter rang me and asked if I would pick her up from the railway station so she could get her car which we’d been storing at our house. I told her she was doing the wrong thing, throwing away everything she’d worked so hard for. But there was no stopping her. She came and got her car and slept in it for four nights in a local park. After fifteen weeks of sobriety she drank a lot alcohol. After four nights she rang me to ask if she could come and have a shower. I called her mother and broke the deadlock and persuaded her to let her have a shower at her house and a chat. Despite being so angry and disappointed my daughter paid for a few night’s accommodation for her, refusing to let her stay with her. Granddaughter is going back into the psychiatric hospital tomorrow. So yes, it’s terribly hard to tell someone what they really don’t want to hear. |
| Blog City ~ Every Blogger's Paradise" Day 2433 January 4th, 2025 Why does January feel like a year- long Monday? I’m not sure about the rest of January but that weird time after Christmas, until at least the first week in January, seems to be a fog when no one knows what day it is. I can hear myself saying, ‘It seems like Friday’ or asking, ‘What day is it?’ all the time! I’m always in a hurry for January and February to be over. Yes, I know I’m wishing my life away, but I’m not a summer person, much preferring autumn and winter here in my home city of Perth Western Australia. I love falling leaves and log fires, electric blankets and soup. I must admit though the stone fruit and berries at this time of the year a plentiful and delicious, especially mangoes, blueberries, raspberries and peaches. I know the song by the Boomtown Rats, goes: I don’t like Mondays, but I don’t mind Mondays. It’s the beginning of a brand new week, when anything is possible. Perhaps I should view January as a time of renewal too. |
Use these words in your entry today: sixth, elegance, spirit, frozen, sense, January, termination, and maneuvers. If I had any sense at all I wouldn’t imagine when the clock ticked over into another year that things would miraculously change for the better. The spirit of whoever decides fate, doesn’t miraculously realise that on January the first, time becomes frozen, the slate wiped clean, and the termination of all things bad and the beginning of all things good. But no, it’s not to be, real life is still in charge. By the sixth attempt at convincing myself otherwise, I feel it would take many difficult but elegant manoeuvres to outrun the problems which life inevitably throws at all of us. |
| Have fun with these words: explode, promote, reasonable, density, composition, compose, moment, prediction, reconcile and shallow. I felt almost ready to explode in the Christmas traffic. Normal, reasonable people seem to lose their equilibrium as they attempt to find a parking space. This time of the year is when you realise the density of the town or city in which we live. There are too many people, and my prediction is we will soon run out of space altogether. I took a moment and tried to compose myself as I drove around and around in the heat of an Australian summer. I attempted to promote a feeling of goodwill and to reconcile myself to the fact my fellow sufferers were all frustrated too. Turning on the radio I was assailed by Christmas music, simple musical compositions which have withstood the test of time and as I sang along in the crush of slow moving vehicles I attempted to lift my shallow thoughts and find some Christmas spirit. |
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