I've moved

Living on Lord Howe Island means slow internet speeds. I'm part of the 0.02 percent of the Australian population without the Australian Broadband Guarantee, so great BIG websites like blogger.com don't work very well. But we adapt and overcome! Please visit my new blog.

As the fashion photographer said to the working mother ...

I read somewhere that mothers who work full-time spend as much time playing with and reading to their kids as stay-at-home mums.  It sounds impossible, doesn’t it?  The researchers discovered that the working mothers found the time by doing less housework and spending less time on their personal grooming.  

By this measure, I think our kids are doing OK.  

I’m not naturally tidy at the best of times.  At the moment, the house is a complete shambles.  There’s rubbish everywhere and this morning I found a cockroach in the cutlery drawer (please don’t tell Luke).  Even though I do the washing, it takes me three days to put it away and it all seems to smell damp.  Little Pixie eats any paper she finds on the floor, vomits and then crawls straight for the bathroom and tries to grab the toilet brush.  (She also stands up, holds onto the bath and turns on the hot tap, but that’s another story).  

A few weeks ago a visiting fashion photographer, Peter Hunt, asked if he could take a photo of me.  I hate having my photo taken – I’m self-conscious, I squint and my face always looks red.  With practice, I’ve learnt to say yes in the interests of promoting Pinetrees.  The photo never seems to make it into the magazine anyway, so it’s really no big deal.  This time, though, Peter said: “But you must have someone do your hair – properly.  Otherwise, just wear a hat”. 

Lord Howe books

I’d lived at Lord Howe for about a year before I discovered the book club.  And now I’m not sure how I lived without it.  We receive ten copies of a novel on the ship from the Port Macquarie library, read them and share them around (there’s usually a few more readers than books).  Every couple of months we meet up to discuss the book, distribute the next book and decide what to order next.  The meetings are wonderful – everyone brings an offering of food and something to drink and we gossip about island politics and women’s business before discussing the book quite seriously and taking turns to rate it out of ten.

 

Over summer, we’ve been reading Bright Air by Barry Maitland – a murder mystery set on Lord Howe.  I was looking forward to reading it, partly because Cindy, who had already read it, said that she’d rather be run over by a bus than read it again.  There's something quite fun about really bad fiction, but in the end I just couldn’t finish it.  Life is too short!  

A visiting journalist, Marion Hume, very kindly gave me a copy of The Freudian Slip last week.  She says that it's wonderful (and that there’s a Lord Howe moment somewhere in the book).  I can't wait to get started.  Hope it's better than Bright Air!