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Thrilling ride for author
She worked in a cake shop, serving well-dressed men and women who would later appear in her books. "I definitely drew on my time in the Cross later on," she said.
Then the war started. The family returned to Queensland to work in an ammunition factory in Brisbane's West End. There she lacquered hand grenades and inserted the pins.
"I loved that job," she said. "Of course the grenades weren't loaded with powder at that time so we were in no danger, but it still felt exciting."
After a year in the job Estelle, then 16, signed up with the American Ambulance Unit in the east Brisbane suburb of Balmoral. There, US soldiers and civilian Australians transported wounded soldiers from the airstrip to hospital.
"At first I was an orderly," she said. More>>
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Coming Soon: SR to Release E-mail Exchanges ... (Not so fast...)
Update: After reviewing the messages and our options (none good), we've decided not to post the messages. Here's the situation: Of the 50 messages, a few have explicit photos embedded in the message. We can't publish those photos (one shows a toddler's penis). We also have a strong ethical policy against blurring or otherwise manipulating photos.
Some of the messages are completely innocuous. The rest of the messages only refer to attachments. Those attachments are explicit, so we can't publish them.
We've also gone through each message to blur e-mail addresses for privacy reasons.
So, if we don't publish any of the explicit images, and we refuse to blur, crop or otherwise alter them, all we're left with is a bunch of forwarded messages that say things like "take a look at this!"
We decided that did not advance the story in any significant way. More>>
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May 2006
My last two homes in Chicago each had their own unique historical aspects, each an example of a classic style unique to that city's storied design past. My spacious condo in a circa 1904, six-unit apartment building, had a gracious, airy floor plan made for entertaining, with a split-parlor living room, beamed-ceilinged dining room and original windows throughout. My most recent home, in the city's famed Bungalow Belt, was one of about 80,000 brick houses built between the early 1910s and the late 1920s, in a collar around the city's outer borders. It had two layers of crown molding, 9-ft. ceilings and built-in, glass-door-fronted bookcases on either side of the ornamental fireplace. Both of these places had acres of full-grained oak trim, still with the original finish. Have you ever tried decorating with that much oak? There are, perhaps, three colors that go well with it, and I used variations of these dark, earthy, depressing hues over and over and over again. More>>