Indelible Adventures

I think being a dad is the best job in the entire world bar none!  Especially now that Zach and Sami who are about to turn 16 and 14 respectively and feel that they can come talk to me about pretty much anything. This week I’ve done a lot of listening and asked a quite a few open ended questions, after each of them had come to me to talk about…stuff!   Its been mostly girl stuff with Zach and Sami all about life, school and the social aspect of being a teenager. I’ve tried to stay objective and listen without any bias or intent, providing just my point of view as if I were in the situation and how I might think about it or react and for the first time in a long while there has been a real and open conversation, no holding back. As I reflected on the enormous difference there is in the relationships I have with my kids versus the relationships, or lack there of I had with my parents. Its staggering as you'd expect.   Now to be completely fair they were operating ...

A number of years ago I read a book called “ A Fortunate Life ” by A.B. Facey and which is considered an Australian literary classic, selling over a million copies.   I guess the fact that A.B. didn't learn to read and write until after his return from the Great War at the ripe old age of 20 years has a lot to do with it, but for me as I read his uncomplicated and straightforward tome it was more than that.   It was his underlying acceptance of his lot in life, he didn't complain about his life’s hardships or his struggles but rather how lucky he was to have lived such a wonderfully rich and amazing life.   The book itself was published shortly before his death in 1982 and was written at the urgings of his kids, with the entire manuscript being written in longhand…okay, that in it is a feat unto itself.   Clearly, it was the culmination of many years of work; of first remembering the stories but then to weave them into a s...

As I sit and listen to the storm outside and thunderous rain on the roof it brings back distant memories of my childhood.  As a kid growing up in rural Australia the summers were hot, and I mean HOT!    We got our weather from the far away Indian Ocean, with hot weather fronts moving in off the ocean, the wind would begin to gather speed as it made landfall in lower Western Australia, amassing additional heat and further wind speed as it leapt over the Great Australian Bight before careening into South Australia, after that it was just a matter of time before we copped it in Victoria. Weather map for this past Jan 14, 2014...told you it could get hot We'd have weeks in the high 30’s and up to mid 40’s Celsius (90 – 110 Fahrenheit) each summer, although for the most part it would build up and up until we had an almighty storm which was accompanied by a “cool change”, then the cycle would start all over again. As I reflect back on my childhood summers ...