A Luce Affiliation

One of my great joys this summer has been watching Jason kill the mosquitos in our bedroom. Generally we have just got into bed when we notice several mozzies zipping around the ceiling. Jason stands up on the bed with a tissue box- his weapon of choice- and tracks the mosquitoes. Then- BAM- he slams the tissue box against the ceiling, often killing two or three mosquitos in a single hit. He is perfectly engrossed in the process and oblivious to how hilarious he looks standing naked on the bed with the tissue box. He prowls all four corners of the bed till there are no more live mosquitos to be seen. Come autumn we will need to clean the ceiling.

Tonight my friend Felicity- a high school psychologist- told me that at her school, students can opt to have their school photos touched up prior to printing. Apparently in last year's photos, nobody in the entire school had a pimple! Unbelievable!! She also said that her students routinely photoshop their Facebook pictures prior to posting them. I have vague memories of obscene hand gestures being airbrushed out of the 'whole-school' photo when I was in year 10. But not optional airbrushing to remove pimples. Over the past two decades photoshopping has become standard practice for fashion shoots and other commercial projects. In fashion photography the viewer expects a flawless image and is generally well aware of its artifice. (Although Susan Sontag would probably point to the artifice of all photography, even in the pre-digital, pre-photoshop era.) I suppose that fifteen year olds now expect photos of themselves to be similarly flawless. And why not?? A digital im

Spending the week down at Inverloch, Jason's parents beach house. Pretty lucky, I know, but *every* time we come down here there is at least one awful great huntsman that crawls out of the woodwork to get me. I hate hunstmen so much. Their fat fleshy bodies and scurrying legs. This time I (fool!) thought I’d be safe because Jason’s parents had already spent two weeks down here, and Jason’s mum had even vacuumed under all the sofa cushions. But yesterday when Jason was moving the old telly yesterday to make way for the new digital one, a big fat huntsman crawled right out of one of its vents. Brrughough. This is in fact the second huntsman to crawl out of that TV, the first one two years ago when we were watching ‘Ghostbusters II’. Other spider incidents: - One was on the ceiling of our bedroom - one crawled out from between the sofa cushions - one was inside the wardrobe - one crawled out from the airconditioner. The last one ran across the kitchen ceiling whilst our friends

We went to Tom Groggin, a lovely bush campsite on the Murray near Thredbo, for a week over the New Year's break. One of our major planned activities for the week was floating down the river and the other two couples came quite well prepared with rubber dinghies and proper lilos, respectively. Jason had bought for us two novelty pool toys. The first was a round inflatable armchair that leaves the rider sitting high above the water, toes just dangling in the water, with no means of steering. The other was a colourful reclining lilo complete with backrest and drink holder. This is my excuse for leading Jason, Nico and I on an unplanned trip down the rapids completely unencumbered by *any* floatation aid. We jumped in the river as far upstream as we were willing to walk on a sticky day. The river was high after weeks of rain. Tara had lilo-ed down that section of the river before and told us, "I nearly died!"and we laughed. After a few hundred metres Nico signalled us of