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Three Days in June by Anne Tyler

It’s the day before her daughter’s wedding and things are not going well for Gail Baines. First thing, she loses her job – or quits, depending who you ask. Then her ex-husband Max turns up at her door expecting to stay for the festivities. He doesn’t even have a suit. Instead, he’s brought memories, a shared sense of humour – and a cat looking for a new home.

Just as Gail is wondering what’s next, their daughter Debbie discovers her groom has been keeping a secret…

The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz

In The Plot, Jacob Finch Bonner was a washed up writer who stole the plot for a novel and then really hit the big time. Now in The Sequel, he's met an untimely death and his grieving widow Anna is picking up the royalty checks before writing a novel of her own.

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Music Reviewer Estelle Clifford talks to Jack Tame about Kiwi duo Foley.

The pair have a new song out called 'Never Feels Like Summer'.

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A recent research article titled “happiness depletes me,” found that trying to be happy (which is defined as striving to experience as much positive emotion as possible and avoid negative emotions) leads to decreased feelings of happiness, and increased levels of loneliness and low energy.

The basic idea is that trying to deliberately change your thoughts and behaviour to be happy means you tend to overlook small naturally occurring moments of happiness. The effort leaves you drained and more likely to make poor decisions such as overspending or overeating, which in turn make you feel unhappy.

Not a new idea – brought to prominence in a book in 2007 by Russ Harris called “The Happiness Trap”

So if your life isn’t going to be focused on finding happiness what should it be focused on?

Happiness Trap suggests:

1. Accepting that negative thoughts and emotions are natural and part of life, do don’t fight against them

1. Enjoy positive emotions when they do occur, and pay attention to the small things in life

1. Live life by trying to act in accordance with your values. One way of identifying core values for you is to ask yourself how you would like other people to describe you in 3 words. The 3 words you choose probably reflect your values. Use these to guide how you live your life. Happiness will occur at times as a pleasant side-effect but life overall will be more worth living.

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We are now in Autumn and that means some wonderful vegetables are needing to be sown or planted asap.

Here in Canterbury, I germinated a row of seeds of French beans – a few weeks ago. They came up pretty quickly and hopefully our late summer will be better than our “summer summer” (which was pretty awful with lower temps and less sunshine than “average”).

In the North Island Your final call for these beans is now. Well-drained soil, nice and moist and in a sunny warm spot, 10 cm separation and keep the weeds under control.

Late summer is also great for peas. Honestly, these are going a lot better when it gets cooler, but seeing we have a longer day-length compared to the early winter situation, you’ll be able to harvest them in large numbers. Mind you, Peas can be planted through autumn and early spring. Their seeds contain a lot of “reserves” to grow in the cooler months; well-drained soils, friable and with compost. Chuck some pea-straw over the soil to help them along.

But I am trying to get ahead of schedule to get some early peas.

Broad beans, similar gig! Plenty of growth potential and they might ripen quite early too

These are good greens for the winter (if you like them)

Broad beans with pretty crimson flowers

Carrot seedlings will also germinate at lower temperatures; Remember to create a soil that is free of lumps and stones, so that the carrots keep straight and do not “fork”.

An extra handful of Phosphate will give them the impetus to grow nice roots.

I start early so we’ll have carrots continuously for the next few months.

Using the carrot “seed-tape” makes sense: they are nicely spaced and can be thinned when they take off,

Julie seems to prefer the thinner, young carrots, whereas I cook the bigger ones as vegie strips in my Nasi Goreng.

Broccoli is another suitable winter vegetable that can be planted now – in fact while there’s still some temperature in the soil they’ll grow well in the next few months – even if they slow down afterwards, you’ve got more than a month’s worth of advance before they start taking it easy – slow ripening means that they don’t all ripen at once, so pick the biggest ones as they mature.

Most other cabbage varieties will also grow from now on

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Is cash a good gift for children?

Personal wealth educator Lisa Dudson unwraps the idea with Jack Tame, and gives her tips on the best thing to teach our children about money.

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Skype is shutting down on May 5.
It was the OG video calling app, but now Microsoft is all in on Teams. Microsoft has developed a way for users to port their Skype account over to a free version of Teams, or to export their data. It's nice that they're making the choices and options clear.
There's one big piece missing though - the ability to call people using phone numbers.
This is probably a good thing.. Microsoft has multiple services - Teams, Skype, Lync - over the years that have all largely done the same thing, but are just integrated into the wider ecosystem differently.
They bought Skype in 2011 for $8.5b - 14 years ago!

Katy Perry is going to space!
She'll be flying on Jeff Bezo's Blue Origin rocket in the next few months. She's making the trip with Jeff Bezo's fiancé - Lauren Sanchez - along with newscaster Gayle King (who is Oprah's best friend), a research scientist, a film producer and a former NASA rocket scientist.

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