Going Gray by Anne Kreamer, is a book I picked up from a second-hand book shop on the way to the hair-dressers.  The irony was, of course, lost on the seventeen-year-old girl who was colouring my hair that day to replace my tired old gray roots with uplifting and shiny “natural” blonde tresses.

Hello to all and welcome to 2010.

This is my freshly scrubbed apple pie family on Christmas Day 2009.   It’s funny how pictures can be so deceptive.  Thinking you know people through photos is a bit like thinking you know someone’s life via Facebook, where only the good parts are on display.  Scratch a family photo deep enough and all sorts of subversive bad behaviour shine through.

In the last week of school last year I got a phone call saying my two teenage boys had hacked into the computer system at Greenwood High, contacted the world’s most wanted terrorist via his email address ( This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ) and threatened to blow up the Universe.  I was suitably horrified and embarrassed and threatened to ground them till they were thirty five.  But in the back of my mind I thought one son wasn’t computer literate enough and that the other was such a Buddhist vegetarian that it went against his principles.  So this needed further investigation.

Computer illiterate son was eventually exonerated because he wasn’t at school that day and someone else had hacked into the system using his password.  The other son, a maths and science nerd admitted he did it because he wanted to know if it was possible and a so-called friend then dobbed him in to the teacher.  His punishment was one day’s suspension.  When he got back to school he’d gone from academic geek to hero superstar overnight and all the popular boys wanted to high-five him.

Now that is a picture-perfect moment.  And my new blog (one of the stories from my book -Death by Teenager) is a good example of a non-picture perfect moment of high school terror in the form of the old green MTT bus circa 1975.

A review of Jodi Picoult's latest tear-jerker, Handle with Care is coming soon.

I hope 2010 is a good year for you.

Cheers Sonia

PS - that little girl in Melissa's arms (my niece Angelia) currently holds the world number one spot for cutest, most gorgeous and adorable toddler ever.  Definitely takes after her mother, my sister.  Not that I'm biased of course.

Ok, so that was such a lame title!  But after 23 years of living five minutes from the coast of Western Australia, who arguably has the best beaches in the world, I’ve discovered the joys of getting up at 6am and taking whichever teenager (or husband) is out of bed and our dog Tipsy (aptly named) down to Dog Beach for a walk.  Dog Beach is next door to Horse Beach and that time of morning the beach is filled with people, dogs and horses.  We’ve even gone swimming before the sun rises over the dunes, braving the sharks, the seaweed and the jellyfish.  Tipsy, our little Maltese/Lhasa Apso cross is so small the tiny waves break over her and unless we lift her up she just stands at the water’s edge barking.

Jodi Picoult’s latest book is a tearjerker of epic proportions.  I like Jodi’s books.  I used to belong to a book-club that sneered at both her and Dan Brown in favour of ones with an impenetrable literary style - and I found that attitude rather arrogant.

There is nothing on earth that induces more unmitigated terror than spotting a bus full of those unholy sadistic creatures known as high school students.  It may be a bright, sunny day but dark clouds suddenly rain down acid 70’s memories where getting tortured by Idi Amin was more preferable option than catching the school bus home.