Training to be an opera singer is expensive. Also, I’m fairly sure we’ve been blacklisted by about 90% of sash window repair people in Melbourne. Madame Verre is the best in the business, having trained generations of successful opera stars, and just to be accepted into her school…well, it was a dream come true. Graduating from here practically guarantees that you’re going to be an international star.
No one mentioned how hard it would be, however, far more than I was expecting. There are thirty levels of training, and you have to progress through them all by practising eight hours a day. Slack off and Madame will smack you with a beech rod before making you sing interval scales for a week. And nobody likes interval scales.
And after all that, there’s the final step of every each level of training, which is shattering a window with nothing but your chosen aria. Thirty arias equals thirty windows broken, and Madame makes us pay for them. Window repair, every single time. You’d think with how expensive the tuition is she’d be a bit more forgiving, but this is Madame Verre’s Operatic Excellence Academy. You do what you’re told, even if it involves breaking perfectly good glass. I’m up to level eleven, and by this time I’m starting to become slightly ashamed every time I have to call in the window replacement people. I’m pretty sure they know our number just by looking, because they always know exactly what we need when I call.
And Madame just had to have the most expensive, ornate sash windows all around the place, the most expensive to replace. Whatever small satisfaction I get from seeing the glass shatter from my very own high notes has steadily faded. By level thirty I’ll probably be blowing out every pane in the place and feel nothing. Yep, whatever Melbourne window replacement and repair place will have us, on the double please. Madame Verre is at it again.
-Florence
As a business owner and entrepreneur, I’m always trying to stay at the forefront of innovation. It’s not enough to be as good as everyone else, the key is to be better, to work smarter, and stay one step ahead of the competition. One of the best ways I’ve found to do that is by trawling through the inter webs and finding the burgeoning trends for the next few years. In doing this, one of the biggest similarities I’ve noticed is the rise of operating your business in an eco-friendly manner.
I 
People keep asking me why my house is so dark. 
I bask in the sunlit garden of utter defeat. Little did I know, all would be taken from me so swiftly; my dignity, my honour, my standing in the community, cruelly torn away at its zenith.
‘Wanderlust’. It’s a strong desire to travel and see the world. Funny how sometimes you can just discover the perfect word for you, like all your feelings have been stuffed into a few little letters. The only vaguely exciting place I’ve ever been to has been Indonesia, and even then my family just stuck to the overcrowded tourist areas. I think I saw a sea turtle at one stage, but it’s not a story that tends to bowl people over at parties. “One time I 
What do you do in your uni lessons?
As caretaker of one of Melbourne’s 
I used to wish I was a pirate, purely based on the Colonel DugScrub books I read as a kid. That guy was a pirate, but he was always clean and never killed anyone. Sometimes he’d search for buried treasure, or maybe brandish a sword at someone, but it was kid stuff. Very sanitised. Then I did a project on pirates in Grade 4 and learned that pirates DO still exist and they’re absolutely no fun. Just a lot of guns and being a pain in the butt of the local coastguard.
I move every year and it’s getting really old. One rental after another, always squirelling away funds for some great house purchase that never comes. One half of me wants to be on the property ladder, and by now I could probably buy myself a mansion if I wanted. And then I think of how I get bored with places