Joan Rule, my grandmother after whom I was inspired to start a blog in the first place, passed away on Friday. Like the many thousands of families which have a member in the late stages of Alzheimer’s Disease, we hope her death was a release. Her mind had left some time ago. Gran was an…
Quick note: If you’re in media, and haven’t read this blog, do so: http://allysonbird.com/2013/03/19/why-i-left-news/ I don’t have a dedicated magazine-reading habit. New Weekly was probably my favourite as an undergrad. I’d read it up the back of the theatre with my university cronies during Media, Law and Ethics lectures. The irony that I now teach…
No home-buying blog can really be written without pointing out the ridiculousness of real estate agent language. There is part of me that is resisting this as a subject. It’s clichéd, and as an ex-journo I can’t help but admit to some level of grammar-nazi-ism. Yet at the same time, I’m not without grammatical quirks myself and have…
Over Saturday morning coffee the West told me a “return in buyer confidence” had resulted in a frenzy hitting the property market. “Frenzy” is a great journo word. It has weird letters like “f” and “z” which only appear together in cool words. Like Fezz, and Fezzik, the giant from The Princess Bride. Frenzy turns…
I once read “Why men don’t listen and why women can’t read road maps.” (yes, this links to the whole book). There are a number of reasons I found this particular tome frustrating, not least because I’ve never had a problem reading road maps. I do, on the other hand, have a terrible sense of direction.…
So we have started. The Swede and I went to our first home open on the weekend. He did not protest. I am considering that a win. We visited two: The first was a small 1920s number on Brisbane St. It would not give us any more room than we have in the Wellington St…
Lawson the Clydesdale survived the fire that destroyed Southampton Homestead in WA’s southwest, although he wasn’t entirely unscathed. The once hairy-mammoth of a horse was pretty singed. A lot of his coat had been burned off and in the pictures I saw of him on facebook, he looked about as miserable as a young Clydesdale…
Asha speaks Creole. Initially, I thought Creole was a single language. However, a few minutes on the iPad reading Wikipedia proved me only half-right, again strengthening my theory that Douglas Adams was uncannily accurate in his description of the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. [Wikipedia] has already supplanted the Encyclopedia Galactica as the standard repository…
This is Holly. Holly has featured in such previous posts as the dog which was hoisted over a balcony to be smuggled into a pub. She’s also one of the Swede’s favourite playmates, is a massive sook and has an obsession with a yellow ball that could stump Cesar Milan. She’s also not our dog.…
I know a wise man called Nick who looks a lot like a pirate when he forgets to shave. He has a pet bird, but both his legs are real, so I guess the comparison only goes so far. It could have been Nick, but it might have been someone else who has been known…
Zeus and the Blonde Nomad 