Wednesday. Nashville.

It's been that long since I've last had to post a large letter that I have no idea how much it costs to post them these days.

Solution?  Simply plaster half the envelope with my now redundant 70 cent stamps.  I'm still a bit dark about those stamps, actually.  The price to post a standard letter went up to a dollar this year!  Thirty cents up from 2015.  Besides petrol, I'm not really sure what it could be that's put the cost of snail mailing up as much as that.  With so much emailing and texting going on right now, shouldn't it cost less to deliver fewer letters?  Especially when I bet Australia Post turns a tidy profit from its Parcel Post service.  Due largely to people like me who are on a first name / recognizable by sight from the side of the street basis with their local delivery van driver.

Besides collaging my letters with stamps, I've been spending the days this week at work packing up my corner of the office.  I'm moving on  next week and so are all my plants.  No one's going to get left behind.  I'm just hoping that the box I've packed them in doesn't tip over on the drive home.

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And I am loving Nashville on Netflix right now.  Who would have thought that the power of The Flix was such that it would have me loving contemporary C&W music?

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Or that it would give be a new style icon?  I love everything about Connie Britton's character, Rayna, on Nasvhille.  Her sense of conviction and inner strength... her hair, her boot legged jeans.

Fauxpard dress - a find at Target for $18 last year.

I've only just started on season one but look at my hair from this morning!!  It's got the start of Connie's volume and curl.  Who knows how fabulous my hair will look by the time I get around to watching the current season?

Nashville is a series about forty something year old country music legend, Rayna.  Rayna's star is on the wane with falling ticket sales to her concerts and a poor fan response to her latest album.  On top of her professional challenges, Rayna faces the 'real world' issues many women in their forties face - walking on a tight rope between her home and work lives, the realities of being responsible for paying the mortgage and supporting her family, raising daughters in the world of twitter and precocious pop music idols and the tension that exists in a relationship when one party is more outwardly 'successful and accomplished' than the other.

Thrown into the everyday problems that Rayna is trying to deal with is Juliette Barnes (played by Hayden Panettiere).  Juliette is the new rising star and darling of the Nashville scene.  Her record sales are off the chart and she has the adoration (and pocket money) of legions of preteen fans (Rayna's daughters included).  Rayna's record company want her to open for the young upstart in a bid to bolster Rayna's waning popularity but she flat our refuses.  The stage is set for a season of cat fighting between Rayna and Juliette.

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Australian Claire Bowen plays Scarlett an aspiring poet who is on the verge of big things when she is spotted singing some of her work at a cafe in the city.  I just could not look away whenever Claire begins to sing on the series.  Her sultry almost blues style singing voice is not what I'd normally associate with the music of Nashville but it works so well.

There's so much that I love about this series.  Aside from the brilliant casting, the scripts are strongly written and it's nice to see a series of this calibre written around the life of a strong but imperfect forty something year old woman facing the issues of a forty something year old woman.  And I'm so fascinated about what I've seen so far of Nashville herself in the series, I've added it to the list of US cities I need to visit sometime in this lifetime.

I've been snooping around the internet and have discovered that there are at least five full seasons of Nasvhille and that Rayna's life takes all sorts of unexpected turns which she handles mostly with poise but always with a clear sense of right and wrong.  Goodie is all I can say to that.