This will hurt me...

Creepy crawly. Russell Falls, Mount Field National Park. April 2013. This Sunday Top Five I hand over to Ezra, who gives us Ezra's Top Five Queen Tracks! Bohemian Rhapsody We Are the Champions Fat Bottomed Girls Don't Stop Me Now Under Pressure

Ezra with creature. Our front yard, Geilston Bay. June 2013. Theme Thursday for June 6, 2013 - It's EVOLUTION in action. Car park EVOLUTION. Hobart is indeed well endowed with car parks. We have more car parks than you can poke a stick at. We have so many car parks, that people never stop complaining that we don’t have enough car parks. The problem with car parks, you see, is that you build car parks and more people get a car to park. The more people with a car to park, the more car parks we need. Then, the more car parks there are, more people get a car that they need to park. Therefore, you build more car parks. So you build more car parks, and even more people will get a car that they need to park. I don’t even drive a car! But we get more car parks. Ever more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and more and...

Pretty beetle. Douglas-Apsley National Park, Tasmania's East Coast. January 2013. Q and A time! Sunday Stealing: The 5000 Question Meme, Part Two 26. Who has done something today to show they care about you? Ezra and Henry have been very good boys (thus far). 27. Do you have a lot to learn? We all have much to learn... 28. If you could learn how to do three things just by wishing and not by working what would they be? 1) To learn a bunch of new languages (German, Russian, French, Spanish, Japanese and Mandarin). 2) To be able to understand and explain the entire range of geological history. 3) To learn the full scope of the world's flora and fauna. 29. Which do you remember the longest: what other people say, what other people do or how other people make you feel? I'd like to think that I remember the action itself, but I suspect that what really solidifies itself in my mind is how the action made me feel. 30. What are the key ingredients to having a good...

Bee! Bath Street, Sandy Bay. October 2011. Two books this week, both very different. The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald features a small town filled with odd characters who are at once marvellously horrid, pathetic and courageous. It’s a short novel, and with an oddly unredemptive conclusion (which is generally up my alley). As it is, the chief moral is the ways in which bullies can be given enormous power by lots of people not bothering to do very small things. One of the chief pleasures of this book is the vivid recreation of time and place: a bleak seaside village during the late-1950s in a Suffolk, England. The weather and the topography of the area are characters in themselves. I've really enjoyed everything I have read by Fitzgerald, and The Bookshop is no different. Highly recommended. The Comfort of Strangers is Ian McEwan's second novel, a tale set in Venice that explores a disintegrating English couple that endeavour to resurrect their relationship through a seri...