This will hurt me...

Cavemen .

Lonely water tower. Boat Harbour, Tasmania's North West Coast. April 2013. A special 'hints and tips' Sunday Top Five today: Five Things That I Have Learned That Are Worth Reminding People Of! It is a lot more difficult to get rid of calories than it is to avoid consuming them in the first place. The ability to be happy is nothing more than working out how to deal with things changing. Bad moods are a reality of everybody’s life, and trying to force them away makes them run deeper and last longer. If everyone in the movie or TV show you’re watching is good-looking, it isn’t worth watching. If anything is worth spending a bit of money on, it’s a high-quality mattress. You spend at least a third of your life using it!

Proud Gull. Boat Harbour. April 2013. It is another Theme Thursday and today sees a burst of CREATIVITY and a shot little piece that came to me on the walk to work. I call it Perception . Quiet Jim was the first of the old gang to die. It came as a bit of a shock to get the invite to his funeral on Facebook. There were five in our gang: me; Quiet Jim (he was the quiet one); Loud Jim (he was the loud one); Big Jim (he was the fat one); and Little Jim (he wasn't very little, but he was much smaller than Big Jim). They just called me ‘Mike’. It was a surprise to all of us that Quiet Jim was the first to go. He was so, well, quiet . Loud Jim drank too much, got into fights and generally wasn't a very nice person.Big Jim’s diet was terrible, he smoked like a chimney and the mere thought of exercise could send him into apoplexy. Little Jim (who really wasn't little at all) had a taste for bizarre sexual practices. I’m pretty laid back, but as an avid trainspotter am al...

Ezra investigates apples. Invariably he will eat a grub.

Jen and Ez await the arrival of the surf vampires...

Look! He isn't talking!

Sunset over Bass Strait. Boat Harbour, Tasmania's North West Coast. April 2013. The Big Knockover and Other Stories , Dashiell Hammett: A collection of ten noir stories from the 1920s and 1930s. Uneven, but when he hits, he hits for the fences. C+ . England Made Me , Graham Greene: An early Greene 'entertainment'. A well constructed little morality tale set amongst the world of international finance and based in 1930s Stockholm. C+ .

Raw periwinkles. In salt. Yum.

Henry and Ezra do their very best impersonation of two shags on a very small rock.

Ezra has found a blackberry. Run, blackberry, run!

Ezra, Jen and Hen. Oozing sincerity. Boat Harbour. April 2013. Theme Thursday . ANZAC Day. INTOXICATE. Sad but true. Beer, flags, patriotism, narrow minded bigots. All the same.

Ezra at dusk.

Can you believe it? He's smiling in a photo!

Sunset, and the boys are thinking about ice cream. Boat Harbour Beach, Boat Harbour. April 2013. As you know, the Internet is a wonderful place filled with the rich and varied treasures of the world holds (and RSS feeds.) The following are some things that I've had a look at in the last week. I call this: a Compendium of Click-throughs for Monday Morning... The Do’s and Don’ts of Photography The Strange Beauty of Salt Mines Hitler's Words Into Stone: Can architecture itself be fascist? 7 billion people on 1 page A .gif of a cat in a shark costume on a Roomba chasing a duckling Wonderful, horrible children's toys based on children's drawings Shady Characters: The secret life of punctuation Vienna, 1913: When Hitler, Trotsky, Tito, Freud and Stalin all lived in the same place A Point of View: Science, magic, and madness Russian volcanoes! 'Don't Think of Ugly People': How Parenting Advice Has Changed in the past hundred or so...

Henry flushes out the tiger snakes.

Shadowboxing?

Flame Robin (Petroica phoenicea). Boat Harbour, Tasmania's North West Coast. March 2013. Wordless Wednesday.

Gnome. Boat Harbour, Tasmania. March 2013. A gnome is legendary dwarfish creature alleged to have been brought to Earth to guard the earth's treasures. I believe that blackberries are uncluded. Blackberry Eating , Galway Kinnell I love to go out in late September among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries to eat blackberries for breakfast, the stalks very prickly, a penalty they earn for knowing the black art of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries fall almost unbidden to my tongue, as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words like strengths or squinched, many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps, which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well in the silent, startled, icy, black language of blackberry -- eating in late September.