Friday

The moon was magnificent this morning! And again this evening - rising as I drove to the station to collect S on her return from Brisbane so it was a huge yellow balloon hanging just above the Eastern horizon.
The construction industry has a "favourite" charity - Homeless Youth and today was National Hard Hat Day - where we have a morning tea to collect money for it. A Gold Coin donation secured a cup cake. Today (this year) they were was from Simply Cupcakes in Ferry Road here on the Gold Coast which is where I suspect Shannon, a recently eliminated MasterChef contestant, is working.
Tink and Maggie may be up to no good! When I arrived home they were returning together - but separately - from down near what I think must be Larry's orchard. M had said she had seen them down there together the other day and wondered if they were hunting. They certainly scurried across the lawn like they had been caught out - or they have a guilty secret. (Are secrets always, or at least most often, guilty?)
As I had a few chores to do at home before S got back from the Happiness Conference, I hurried straight home from work- if you don't count having to go back in from the parking lot to collect the external hard drives I had left locked in my bottom drawer of my desk - yes, it's a good place to keep them (always store back-ups off site) but it wouldn't have done when The Great K arrived to pick a couple of them up. I was only surprised that I remembered them before I left work completely: usually I'd be just arriving home before I'd even remembered that I'd been meant to be remembering something. Then, chores dome (as M took the newly returned ROM for a turn around Hermes' paddock) I took myself off for a reward coffee at Zarraffas. The clientele is quite different in the early evening - there was not a student in sight this evening although there was a young toddler who was entertaining the adult folk she was with - and the rest of the store - with her attempts to drink what looked like a babycino in a small (not very) cup with extra chocolate sprinkled on the milk foam. In the end she had chocolate just about everywhere around her face where the rim of the cup had touched. She looked to be having a great time though and seemed to be very happy!
I was waiting on the platform (watching the moon) when S's train pulled into the station. She, too, seemed very happy - which you would hope from a person who had just been to two days of a conference called "Happiness and its Causes" - which included a session with His Holiness the Dalai Lama.
And she wasn't the only one to go to the Conference. When I texted M this morning, she wrote back to say there were no single-session tickets for the Dalai Lama's session available but that she would wait around for a chance to see him - and see him she did when he walked through the heavily-police-presenced Convention Centre foyer. She also took the opportunity to sit in on Madonna King's session for Radio 612 Brisbane as she interviewed various speakers from the Conference in that same area.