Author: Melissa

A few weeks ago I bought about a dozen packets of seed – different varieties of herbs and salad vegetables. I’ve sprouted some capsicum and sage so far. Got to get some more little pots for the rest of my seeds!

I’ve been on this little self-sufficiency kick since I can remember, it has never really progressed very far! H., who years ago swore he hated gardening and would replace the back lawn with astro-turf (fake, plastic grass) or concrete now likes the idea of planting fruit trees.

We have the room, maybe we’ll get around to it one of these days!

It’s about 2pm and I’m on the phone trying to help poor Ivy so-and-so out of her email pickle, when there is frantic knocking at my back door.

Normally people wouldn’t get past the front gate with Kel on patrol – but she was inside the house with me and didn’t hear anything past the air conditioner.

I finished up my call, went to the back door and there was this overweight, middle aged woman with a miserable look on her face. It is 40 degree heat and she is sweating like a pig, and she asks if she could come in and sit down.

I didn’t know who on earth she was so I suggest she seat herself in the shade on our back veranda.

She said she was visiting a friend of hers a couple of houses up who had a crazy fit and turned her out on the street.. didn’t have transport, stranded out here where there’s only a few houses and the highway. No shops, public transport or phone for miles.

The woman she had the fight with is the local crazy woman – about a year ago she was going around lighting fires in peoples yards. The woman on my veranda is likely to be just as crazy.

Anyway, she’s distressed and says she’s not feeling real well so I get her cold drinks and wet towels to try and cool her down and offer to ring her son to come pick her up.

No answer on his number, so she gives me the number of a friend. Speak to the friend’s son who sounds like he couldn’t give a toss about the situation. So I offer to drive her back into Redbank myself. Ring my boss who’s not there, so leave a message that I have to duck out.

Ring H. before I leave (he’s at work) and he says I should call the local police instead. Now why didn’t I think of that?! So they’ve just been here to pick her up, I didn’t have to drive her anywhere after all.

Well that was my excitement for the day. Not that I really needed it!

When was the last time we had a decent break? Can’t think – maybe the camping trip to Carnarvon, shortly after we were married. We spent several days there, then motored east to Rockhampton and slowly made our way down the coast with many stops on the way. Great memories.

No, I remember now it was the trip to Fraser Island about five years ago, with our friends. What a fantastic place.

Well, we are on a week’s leave now. It is nice to simply not HAVE to be anywhere or do anything. We went up to Toowoomba on Monday, visited the Cobb & Co Museum, then went to explore a few of the old trails in the Defender.. tracks a bit boggy (a lot of rain recently, praise be!) nearly got stuck, decided to be sensible and stick to sealed roads!

Today, I have an old garden furniture set to restore – H rescued it from the other house, left behind by the last lot of tenants. Needs a bit of elbow grease to clean it up, fresh lick of paint. I have a spot on the veranda facing the garden where it will make a nice rest spot. Not too far from the coffee pot!

In 1996 I had my first introduction to web publishing, via internet chat rooms where many of the participants had their own homepage. How cool! I wanted one!

I went to Geocities Homestead and created my first homepage, using the simple online tools they had back then. I started making web pages offline in Netscape Composer and learning more about this HTML stuff. I was hooked!

I created hobby pages, family pages and Lissa Jane’s Dogicons. I signed up as a volunteer web author with my State Library and created web sites for various community groups.

My volunteer work was a useful addition to my CV and helped me get a job with an internet provider company, maintaining their company web sites and creating sites for customers. It was during this time that my learning curve went off the scale, as I learned about domain names, web hosting and cgi programming.

In the last ten years the face of web publishing has changed considerably and it is a challenge to keep up with emerging standards. I am developing sites in XHTML and CSS now, with strict separation of structure and layout in the code. The result is pure joy. I love organising information and giving form to function.

I tend to struggle with design concepts but there are many tools to overcome this deficiency – my current favourite is Xara Webstyle. And the web itself is a constant source of inspiration – a beautiful place to wander is the CSS Zen Garden.

There are many online resources for teaching yourself about creating web pages; Webmonkey was one of the first such sites I discovered, and is a term used to describe people who enjoy playing with code.

I kept a journal many years ago, back in the days before email and sms. Thoughts flowed from my pen as I gave vent to relentless introspection.

Then my husband came into my life; we moved into our first house and the journals remained buried at the bottom of a storage box. And rightly so, they are a collection of self-indulgent rantings.

But therapeutic at the time. Must be why so many people have “blogs” these days. I’ve decided to join the ranks, and hopefully make sense of the jumble of thoughts that have accumulated in my head over the years.