Category: happiness
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A Tree Change For Your Act 3?
I’d never heard of the expression “tree change” before some brave friends of our did exactly that and moved six hours north of Sydney to the foothills of a beautiful inland town called Bellingen. When you go for a dip and someone’s playing a f**king didgeridoo. Tree changes are a real thing and another retirement…
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Christmas In The Sun
A few days before Christmas I couldn’t decide whether the sparkle of the festivities had begun to dim with age. It’s not like they don’t go as hard here in Australia, it’s just different to what I’m used to and so takes a little longer to get the Christmas juices flowing. In spite of being…
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Retirement: Sea Change Or No Change
It feels like we’ve been planning our retirement our whole lives, yet now as we inch closer to our target, the old man and I have realised that the dreams we shared in our early years together may have changed. I thought that my aspirations would centre around little more than long lunches at the…
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‘Tis The Season Of The Family Holiday
It’s that character-building time of the year when all those carefully thwarted irritations caused by living with people you didn’t choose to live with, are thrown squarely into the spotlight on the family holiday. Why I insist on instilling this week of hell bonding I have no idea, but I get sentimental after I watch…
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Whatever Floats Off Your Boat
Like many people I suspect, whenever I’m under pressure to perform or create an impression, I fuck up badly. Last weekend we were invited onto the boat of some of the old man’s work friends. For normal people, the idea of jet-setting around on a yacht in the clear, emerald-green waters of the Hawkesbury on…
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Every Picture Tells A Story
I did a job I do about once a decade the other day; I changed the photos in my photo frames. It’s an onerous task that has about as much appeal as cleaning the barbecue or filling in school forms because you have to be a maths genius to work out how to print the photos to…
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The Best Five Therapies To Cure ‘One Of Those Days!’
You know, the real bitch kind of day that I seem to have a lot of, when the proverbial shit hits the fan so hard and fast you haven’t even had time to rub the fairy shit out of your eyes, let alone imbibe your first coffee before your phone rings. At 6.30am, no less,…
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‘Pretend You’re Good At It’
I’m reading “Furiously Happy” by Jenny Lawson, (aka The Bloggess) at the moment, upon the recommendation of Lana Hirshowitz, and although I initially struggled to decipher the twisting maze of her brain patterns, I’ve since tapped in and have found myself identify with the author’s self-professed craziness and daily struggles with anxiety. The book is…
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I Should Have Packed The Wine
‘You’re the one that I want…’ the old man sang to me when I got up this morning. A sincere effort, I believe, to calm the storms that have inevitably begun to build up as we get ready to move. He’s been in a suspiciously good mood all week which he has tried to disguise…
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Those ‘What’s It All About?’ Moments
I’ve been having a lot of those ‘what’s it all about?’ moments recently. I changed my medication recently so it could be that, or simply a residual post-sickness tiredness that has sapped me of the energy to exercise, socialise and get out of my yoga pants. Then again it’s probably the hormones, the tail end…
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Moving House Again
We’re on the move again. Or perhaps we’re running away. We do this a lot as the relationships in our family, that now comprises of four adults, continue to evolve. The average age for kids to leave home is now 27 due to rising house prices, as opposed to 21 in the past, so I…
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The Hardest Part Of Parenting Is Agreeing How To Parent
When we were in London a few months ago, we listened to LBC, a talk radio station where current news topics are raised and listeners call in to voice their opinions. One of the topics was about the LGBT community and how universities are providing halls of residence strictly for LGBT students in a bid…
LOUISA SIMMONDS 