Welcome to Lavender Blue, a personal website, funded by me and mainly for me. I pay for both the internet address, and the web hosting. The front page contains my useful quick links. The other main parts of the site are Family History and Port Germein History, which may also be accessed by the menu at the base of the pages.
There's lots of writing because that's what I do. Don't read it on a phone. Use a computer.

WHY LAVENDER BLUE
I really wanted to call my website "Lavender Blue" and use that as my address, having always loved lavender, both its smell and appearance, since childhood. The song, "Lavender Blue dilly dilly..." was also a favourite then. The "Blue" was appropriate because as a redhead, I was nicknamed "Blue" at Eyre High in Whyalla by some disgruntled, fellow male teachers, after a disagreement, and the nickname stuck.
Sadly, almost every permutation of lavender had already been used for website addresses, so on the advice of my husband and sons, I simply used my own name for the web address, though doubtful about doing that. It has turned out to be both good and bad. Hardly anybody has been able to find it because they can't spell the name, but I haven't been much troubled by spam. Call me cynical, but most people have a short attention span and few take the trouble to read anything carefully.

COMPLAINTS DEPARMENT
I can't help thinking we are all too passive about things that could be easily improved or fixed and put up with them without protest. Complaining out loud is almost un Australian, as I mention in my comments about Spotlight, the shop. It is especially frowned upon for women to complain. If you can see something wrong and come up with a way to make it better, however, why not complain? Anyway, that's how my complaints page started. It gives me an outlet for my frustrations. I named it in memory of the lady who ran the Goodwood Primary School canteen and was forced to put up with my son, who would go over and let her know if she got his lunch order wrong. One day she looked at him and said, in a long suffering voice, "Complaints Department!" As of November 2021 I've made it into 2 pages- a new one for urban and suburban complaints. The way suburban infill is happening, I will have plenty of complaints to make.

CONSTRUCTION HISTORY
This website began in Jan 1998 as "English Teaching," to provide easy computer links to topics being studied in my classes, when we were able to book a lesson in the computer room. I had already used the Education Department network called Nexus prior to the internet, and been absolutely blown away by the potential for interesting classroom writing and communication.
After trying various complicated page construction programmes, I was told by a clever young student in the computer room at Unley High School, when I was on lunchtime 'yard' duty, to write the pages myself in html. Over the Xmas holidays I made use of "The Bare Bones Guide to html," found online. Html was sensible and satisfying to write and I have continued to use it, despite basic html being out of date now. Maybe it is not sufficiently flexible for all the complexities of modern websites but my pages are mainly simple information and have worked well for the last 23 years. Some of the history is located at the bottom of each page because one soon forgets when something happened. I notice that there is now interest in how the internet evolved and feel proud that I was an early user. Modern generations have absolutely no idea how difficult it once was to obtain information about almost everything, before the internet. You had books and you had libraries and you had to wait until you could access them to get what you needed, if there was a book or magazine available, which had that information.

HOSTING HISTORY
Since a website needs to be hosted on the internet, from Jan '98 I used the free service provided by (American) Geocities, but moved to Adelaide Net, a free Camtech site in May 2000. Camtech closed and I re-located to another free host site provided by Bigpond, in June 2001. Bigpond, in turn, shut down their free web pages, Jan 2008. Free web pages meant that you had to use their chosen address. Finally I moved to a paid web host, Go Daddy, on 22-1-2008. The web counter showed 47,660 views of the "English Teaching" index page, from June 2001 to Jan 2008. (No advertising, no publicity and no support from family or colleagues in terms of views!). I moved the "English Teaching" page from the front of my website as the index page, on December 21st, 2011, to mark the start of non teaching life and consolidated various teaching links on one page on 5-4-2013. It's slowly disappearing as links become outdated, though it's hard to say goodbye to old friends.

PERSON HISTORY
I taught English, some Society and Environment, some Maths, and occasional other related subjects (Public Speaking, Information Processing) in the public education system in South Australia for 45 years. Making educational web pages was fascinating and useful for me, the students and colleagues, though colleagues and friends, invariably asked, "What was your web address again?"

Now I mainly use my webiste for family history and for exploring and recording the local history of Port Germein, particularly as related to the wonderful sailing ships which visited Port Germein from 1881 until about the end of World War 2.