It's a Classical Life

  Doing word searches and cross words is one of my favourite past times. I find them really relaxing and I know there are those of you who do too. I've also realised that I actually really like making  word searches. Today I have one for you based on the Golden Age of Hollywood. I mentioned here that I've been enjoying watching film noir movies and others from the 1930s-1950s so was inspired to make one based around that time.  Downloading the word search is simple. Either click on the jpeg image above and print it, or you can click on the pdf link below. The Golden Age of Hollywood Word Search If you're interested, you can find the other word searches that I have created  here . I hope you enjoy doing these as much as I'm enjoying creating them. Have a lovely and relaxing weekend.

  Last week I spoke about embracing autumnal comfort food. This week I thought I would share with you what is on my menu plan. Normally I plan our menu for the whole month, but I'll just share with you what's coming up this week. We make pizza dough from scratch, but this can easily be bought or you can use pita bread for a tasty and economical alternative. My husband makes the pizza sauce, which includes antipasto such as sun-dried tomatoes, artichokes, olives and pieces of bacon or pepperoni. Once the pizza is topped with that all you need to do is add cheese. I also love my pizza with thin slivers or soft sweet potato and baby spinach. They can be as simple or as extravagant as we like. We tend to buy pre-made chicken schnitzels and battered fish for the burgers, but this can easily be substituted for home-made. Most of our meals are a mix of home-made and conveniently pre-made. I find this is best for those days when my husband and I are both working and perhaps lacking th...

  In her book, Cosy: The British Art of Comfort , writer Laura Weir says: "In my daily life, I am surrounded by noise and opinion, and over the past few years I have found myself seeking comfort from politically dark winters and the relentlessly bleak news cycle. My instinct has evolved and become an undeniable urge to hide away and find solitude. Rather than swipe and scroll my way through life, I want to feel protected and nurtured. I don't just want to drink a warm cup of tea, I want my emotional state to mirror that cuppa too - warm, predictable, reassuring. Perhaps I'm just getting old, but I want to swap toxic politics and anxieties induced by social media for reliability and kindness. I want to feel more cosy." Oh my, yes please! Count me in! She goes on to explain that cosy is what you do when no-one is watching - it's your definition of cosy, not one that is being prescribed by current trends or marketing techniques. This book really made me think. In Aus...

SOURCE   It's been a while since I've written a Saturday matinee post but when I watched the film The Blue Dahlia  (1946), written by Raymond Chandler and starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake I knew I had to share it with you. I loved this film so much, and even weeks after watching it I keep thinking back on it. The great thing is, you can watch online too here . The Blue Dahlia  is considered one of the original film noir movies. If you've never heard of the term before, film noir it refers to a particular style of movie, made popular in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s. Elements of this particular style include dark lighting aspects, a crime or mystery to be solved (they often included detectives or private investigators) and a moral lesson to be learnt. Post WWII films made also included some of the challenges that society faced after the end of the war. The Blue Dahlia does this rather poignantly through the scenes of the character Buzz Wanchek (William Bendix) who s...

Last year my son got his first job. It paid about $11/hour. He quickly learnt that the things that he bought were paid for, per hour of work. For example, lunch with friends might have cost $20, which he saw as two hours work. He didn't particularly like his job and two hours work just to pay for lunch wasn't worth it in his opinion. I was amazed at how quickly he learnt that important lesson - ie, our money is worth our time.  Henry David Thoreau said, The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run. My current job is a real pay-cut from my teaching job (but I love it so much more!) and yet I found that I was spending as if I were still on a teacher's income. I was dipping into my savings to pay for things I didn't really need. For the last two months I have realised just how frivolous my spending had got. For the last couple of years I had been tracking my spending (on clothes only). L...