Dramatis persona*

helenhead Helen Chick

I've always wanted a bumper sticker that said "I'm a female, LDS/Mormon, Scout leading, geocaching, piano-playing, bicycling, mathematics educator with a PhD in maths ... and I VOTE"!

I think this makes me a minority group of cardinality 1!

* Since there's only one of me and "personae" is plural (I think), I've gone with dramatis persona.
April 2011
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Tasmanian autumn

On the mainland part of Australia, the only deciduous trees are European imports; all the gum trees (eucalypts) are stubbornly evergreen.

Tasmania, however, is home to Australia’s only autumnal leaf-dropper, Nothofagus gunnii, otherwise known as “fagus” for short, or the deciduous beech, or “tanglefoot” because of its dense impenetrable large-shrubbiness.

It grows in only a few alpine and […]

Family at the zoo

Just before Easter my quiet little abode became more crowded and noisy when my Adelaide brother and his family came to stay for four nights. They were on their way to Tassie for their first visit in over two years, and I caught up with them again down there after Easter for a family reunion which […]

Bad combination

I am an absent-minded […]

12 of 12, April 2011

For this month’s 12 of 12 I decided to set myself a bit of a photographic challenge. I have already used my iPhone for 12 of 12, back in January, but I cheated a bit then because I also manipulated the images to create sepia “old photo” effects, and so you weren’t seeing the iPhone as […]

A pair of wooden beads

In the Scouting movement, the kids’ accomplishments are acknowledged with the award of cloth badges, as they learn stuff, complete challenges, and develop their interests. We leaders get very few badges: just a few identifying tapes and badges to say which troop and district we belong to (which the kids have anyway), and every so often […]

One of those days …

Today was one of those days in which I had grand plans for dealing with the To Do list and then, just as I was about to start on it, something more urgent cropped up, which was interrupted—a few minutes later—by something even more imperative … and it all went downhill from there.

To make matters worse, […]

The greatest invention since …

Many, many, many moons ago I spent the princely sum of $50 on what was then the state-of-the-art, bee’s knees, absolute-must-have, gear-freak’s delight, whiz-bang new bushwalking toy.

A headlamp.

And not just any headlamp: a Petzl.

It had a halogen globe for extra brightness and a zoom beam so that you could vary the dispersion of the light.

After enduring […]

One year of my life

For part of the weekend just past (1-3 April) we had another Scout camp, where we had a bit of a cooking-fest including the production of an excellent batch of golden syrup dumplings to prove a point against the memory of a rather disastrous concoction from a camp long past.

However, that’s not the point of this […]