I now own a Dr Seuss book

As of 2016, I own a Dr Seuss book.

It's the first one I've ever owned.

Yes. The first.

I was an adult before I ever even heard of Dr Seuss. (In my defence, I grew up on an island, and although I definitely wasn’t short of books – I had the Mr Men and Little Miss books, the Ladybird books and hundreds of Enid Blytons among others – but Dr Seuss wasn’t one of them).
Green Eggs and Ham was the first of his books that I met. I loved the wonderfully quirky characters with their long eyelashes and the nonsensical-and-yet-somehow-entirely-plausible landscapes that are so quintessentially Dr Seuss. The phrase “I do not like them, Sam I am” also quickly slipped into my daily vocab and is still going strong.

Then (thanks to the treasury that is the Brain Pickings blog), I discovered in quick succession, Dr Seuss’ wonderfully surreal paintings of unmistakably Seuss-ian worlds and characters, his WWII political cartoons, and finally, his lesser-known adult book, The Seven Lady Godivas.

How can you not adore drawings like these?!

(One of Dr Seuss' surreal landscapes)

So I was absolutely, utterly charmed when, on Dr Seuss’ birthday (he would have been 112 years old!), HarperCollins Australia sent out their regular email newsletter with nothing in it but “Happy Birthday Dr Seuss” with a couple of recognisable grinning characters.

It was a gorgeous and fitting email to mark the good Doctor’s day, and I just had to take a pic and tweet it. As you do.

Imagine my delighted surprise HarperCollins Australia not only liked and retweeted it, but also said they would send me a little thank you pack – from themselves and Dr Seuss! A mere few days later, I was the proud owner of my very, very first Dr Seuss book: What pet shall I get?

The tale and finished artwork were discovered after his death amongst his papers freshly-published. And does it contain quintessential Dr Seuss rhymes and Dr Seussian-styled illustrations? You bet! All wonderfully-drawn, character-filled animals with super-long eyelashes, including the fishies!

There's a helpful note from the publisher about the context of the book's pet shop, about buying or adopting, about the responsibilities of having a pet, of looking after them and caring for them. This expands into a beautifully-written biography about Dr Seuss (and his dog!)

This book was a wonderful gesture by the HarperCollins Australia folks which I will appreciate always!

This lovely handwritten note sums up the delightfulness of the gesture:

Thank you lovely folks at HarperCollins Australia! :-)

The Sun and the Moon

The following little story came to me while driving home one night on a dark road lit up in silver by a half-moon. I suddenly had a fanciful little image of a car smilingly gobbling up a crescent-shaped sliver of moon-flake which helped its headlights shine brighter. Such an image wouldn't normally find a home outside my head, but

Getting the Right Accent

There was a Twitter hashtag which did the rounds recently: #tweetjustyourvoice. The idea was to use record an audio of your voice with a visual that didn’t include your face, and then post it onto Twitter so that your communities of tweeps (Twitter folk) get to hear how you sound. I would have probably continued on my merry way, happily ignorant of all things connected to this hashtag, except that it got embraced with gusto by the FridayPhrases community , with a certain FridayPhrases host (the very persuasive @AdeleSGray ) inviting me to take part. If ever there was a hashtag designed to wallop me well out of my comfort zone, it was this one. Why? Thank you for asking. There are several reasons.

An Extra-Ordinary Spring Saturday

Saturday the 10th of September was one of those magic spring days. It started like this: It was the kind of day where the sun is beautifully warm and the breeze is playful and joyous. The kind of day where, when LittleOne and I went out onto the deck in the morning and the breeze ran up to say hello, we each instinctively, impulsively inhaled and exclaimed about how lovely the day was! The kind of day that LittleOne said felt just like the beach. The kind of day where the air is watermelon-scented, and you just want to both bottle it and let it soak in your very cells forever. That kind of spring day. We saw the first hibiscus flower in our garden in a lovely shade of pink-red that was just slightly more deep pink than red. We saw bees merrily visiting the white-and-pink-edged blossoms all over our prolific lemony-lime tree. We saw a kookaburra bird come and perch on the arbor in the garden. It gave a couple of its deep-throated chuckles, but didn't break out into

Dodo Au Go-Go

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