I have a paperback proof in my hand! Accepting advance orders!
I collected the actual physical book this morning from the post office. Excitement plus! Mr O Jnr 2 declared it “sick!”
Front
The book looks wonderful to me! Staff at work were impressed and I received many congratulations. My photos here are not at all professional – those will come when I let Mrs Bryson loose with her fancy photographic equipment. “Yay!”, I thought, “I can go home and write a great article announcing availability and offering an advance order opportunity to our followers!” I drove home wondering should I have a give-away for the 10th or 20th or something order email. 
I stopped off at the post office to price postage and handling costs for people buying directly from me.
At home I dug out the quotations for the various quantities and the email listing the items Lightning Source suggest paying special attention to when checking the proof. Yes, it says eproof, but as this is a colour interior book, it is actually a physical book proof, not an eproof as it would be for a black & white interior book.
A few items to carefully consider before approving your eproof:
1. Have your latest changes been incorporated?
2. Is the pagination correct: odd number pages on the right/recto and even numbers on the left/verso?
3. Is the text block and page items positioned correctly on the page (is the text getting cut off the top, for example?)
4. Does your proof contain spelling errors, grammatical errors, or typos that need to be corrected?
5. Is the ISBN included and correct / identical on both the cover and copyright pages?
6. Please verify the price on the cover matches the price in the metadata
Womanhood: from menstruation to menopause
Being a woman is a bit weird at times. We are the gender that gives birth to the next generation and we have all this complicated plumbing to enable us to give the miracle of life. To the men who are brave enough to read on, hopefully I’ve written this is such a way that you won’t be left feeling “yucky” and might give your wife, sister, mother or female co-workers a little consideration! 
I am not alone:
The importance of the menopause can best be comprehended when it is realised that there are over 2 million post-menopausal women in Australia, and that every year about 80,000 new women join this group.
These women constitute 40% of all health care visits in Australia.
The female journey starts off around the time we become a teenager (which seems to be getting younger and younger). We develop breasts and grow hair in places we’re not used to having hair and worst of all we start menstruating. Yuck! Most of us, aside from brief respite periods (no pun intended) due to pregnancy, put up with the monthly inconvenience for forty plus years. A man did once say to me, “Don’t know what you women are complaining about, men have to shave every day.” I didn’t get it then and I don’t get it now, but that was his view on life.
So we put up with this for forty or so years and then if we are unlucky, the plumbing starts to get a bit rusty. Maybe we get fibroids, a prolapse, clotting, etc etc etc. The list of possible issues is quite long!
School camps by the score
OK – I’m exaggerating – we don’t have 20 kids, even if it feels like it sometimes. We are having the best and worst week, in the same week.
For some reason that escapes my befuddled brain, Miss 10, Mr 12 and Mr 15 (nearly 15) ALL went to camp the same week. So while we have five quieter nights with less noise machines, the logistics have been wearing!
Off to camp!
Why? I don’t understand why.
Marriage
I have a story to share that came to my notice last night. One of the readers of Love versus Goliath (the book) told me he knew how we felt. He was made to feel like a criminal for falling in love with an “Evil Oriental”.
Was this last year? Five years ago?
It was the early 1990s. Let us say twenty years ago in round figures. Twenty years ago and NOTHING HAS CHANGED!!!
Yes, I accept our case was slightly more unusual because Mr O was an asylum seeker. However, citizens DO have rights. This reader and myself had rights.
I asked him to write a guest article for this website. I found his response VERY SAD.
“I would love to, but after reading yours, too many emotions have surfaced and I don’t think I would have your strength to do it.”
The pain of his experience, after twenty years, is still so powerful the emotions were caused to resurface by his reading our experience.
I have chosen not to identify our reader here. He has experienced enough pain already.
Day 3 of the default drama
We still do not actually have a copy of the bill, but it is coming. Despite the fact we are in no way liable for this $208, we paid it. Sorting it out with the Red Cross and DIAC could take months, which really doesn’t help anything.
Believe it or not, it goes like this. The bank pre-approve the car loan, subject to us paying the $208. I can understand this – it is not the bank’s decision to make about whether we are liable or not. I try to pay the bill. I CAN’T!!! The bill is too old, there was no way on the electricity company’s systems that I could pay it!
At that point I I cried. It was like being back 20 months ago. The tears just ran down my face. I couldn’t stop them. All the pain and fear just seemed to come rushing back. This should not be happened kept ringing in my ears. Again I felt I was drowning.
The young man who manages the electricity company’s Twitter account was wonderful. I have no idea about the rest of the company, but he was lovely. He organised for the company to open a new account so we could actually pay, then sent me a confirming email I could forward to the bank. Of course, all this took so long we still do not have a final approval stamp from the bank! He also confirmed the advice I received last night that these things drop off after five years. I knew nothing, of course: I’ve never had such a situation.
Frank’s Seafood Bistro
One of our favourite restaurants is changing hands. Frank is retiring after 31 years!
Seafood Bonanza for two
I have eaten at Frank’s off and on for probably 15 years. My old friend that now lives in the USA (a spouse visa going out of Australia) held a dinner there when they got married. Delicious.
A couple of weeks ago Mr O and I went out for a kid-free few hours. It had been a while since we’d had a date night and knowing Mr O likes seafood, I thought Frank’s might be just the ticket! It was certainly a hit with Mr O!
A Common Enemy
The Earth seen from Apollo 17. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Earth sparkled in the sunlight, a blue and white ball gliding through space in the orbit determined millennia ago.
The ship hovered above, listening to the babel of voices detected by the sound sensors. Leader Rosna shook her lateral tendrils in horror.
“How does this planet survive?”
The sound technician was battling to isolate the various sound patterns, to determine any intelligible communication patterns. Never in all their eons of exploration had the team seen anything like this. This planet sustained life, that much they knew. Would it sustain them? Could they live with the natives? Where the natives controllable? Could they be worked?
First the team needed to understand the degree of evolution. From what could be determined so far, this was a primitive planet. There were no space ships arriving or leaving, although there was a strange looking building orbiting the planet. Primitive weapons had been detected, mostly in isolated areas of the planet. Clearly these would need to be subdued first.
Rosna stared down at this blue and white ball. It looked so peaceful from her vantage point, yet the sounds, the sounds told a different story. So sad. It was the standard practice of the Elengia to peacefully co-habit with the natives of the planets they colonised. To share the technology, solve any problems they found and gently enhance the lives of the natives. So far, this planet was sounding like a disaster.
Rosna considered turning the ship around and leaving this rabble to their own destructive devices. But there was water on this planet and the Elengia needed water. Planets with such water supplies were few and far between in the universe and there were no others in this solar system.
