Links to my stories by topic/category —

Observe the old rotting gum tree, busily populated with living organisms, dead to us, yet a thriving source of food for other species. — “Ancient trees are precious. There is little else on Earth that plays host to such a rich community of life within a single living organism.” If asked, it’s easy for most of us to explain the value of trees in terms of their providing shade, food, cleaning the air, emitting…

Symbiotica, a passionate close ‘relative’, is a new publication on Medium where you can write to your heart’s content about the natural world. — I have already tagged Kelly Baldwin Heid in the hope that she would get many followers. Kelly is presently living with her family in Germany while studying for her PhD. She writes. “My name is Kelly Baldwin Heid, and I’m a natural urbanist and global urban health professional interested in…

So, now is the time to release them from the closet of obscurity, to polish them up, and give them a second chance to glow. — Kerry Purvis is the creator of the ICYMI Challenge. or, the FU Medium’s Algorithm challenge. Trisha Faye shared the challenge with me. Many writers on Medium simply have no idea as to how Medium’s algorithm works, but for most writers it seems to be rarely in their favor. As a…

Just think about that for one moment. Old lady with dementia… a knife in hand, a veritable threat to the boys in blue… — So here is the scenario. A 95-year-old lady, frail, weighing 45 kg, and using a walking frame to steady herself, a menace to society, living in a nursing home, somehow has a ‘serrated’ knife in her hand. It may be the case that… She had refused to hand it over to a staff member. That information…

Now she has truly found her way. Thank you Facebook for shining the light. — I had to check twice. Could this possibly be the same woman who only a few years ago had had an uphill health fight on her hands? I rarely go on Facebook. But I did recently. Some guiding hand must have led me there. It’s where I found her, but…

The time has come when we two should part company. A few dimes per hour for hours of writing, if that, is much harder, than begging on the streets. — I had a choice yesterday, to write another ‘crickets’ article, or clean some cupboards. I elected to do the latter. I received no real payment for my efforts, which is almost on par with Medium payments these days. Yet I’ve been writing on Medium for three years this month.

What about students already committed to a career…an already-prize-winning chef, for instance? How can we ensure those last three years are more productively spent? — The teacher droned on. For Jacob the only relevance to Pythagoras was how it would play out in cutting his cakes…sigh! Doing school till you reach 18, is not for everyone. Leaving doesn’t mean you are a failure. Having worked on a personal plan, is everything.

A horror back-end collision happened as a Melbourne school bus driver waited to turn right at traffic lights…young lives have been tragically and irrevocably impacted. — When you say goodbye to your children at the school gate, give them your fullest attention. Always. Australians woke to the most horrendous of news. The news was delivered by the CEO of a Melbourne hospital. That is not usually the duty of a CEO.