Farewell

Rest in peace, Percy.

You were so loved.

Makes me Happy.

On Friday night we had a girls’ night. My two sisters, Ashleigh and I. First out to dinner, then onto a nightclub to hear some live music.

Sounds so hip, doesn’t it? Well… really we went off to a nightclub that had couches and chairs. I just sat on my chair and stayed there, waiting for the concert to begin.

Of course we were asked for our identification as we went through the doors. Although, once Ashy had shown hers the security person said that it wasn’t necessary to see the others.

A hopeful young man approached the beautiful Miss Ashy to chat. She looked over her shoulder to point me out and told him, “I’m with my mother.” He shook her hand and withdrew from her company.

Why did we go out that night?

To see the very beautiful Josh Pyke.

It makes me happy…

Tiny drops of water and big doggy footprints…

Over the weekend my Pete and I moved three trailer loads of dirt from the front yard into the new vegetable patch.

My Pete did the shovelling and wheelbarrowing and I just smoothed the dirt out with a rake after he had put it into the garden bed. You can see by this photo that my work was quality assured afterwards.

We planted peas, beans and tomatoes…

lettuce, basil and strawberries.

It’s still hot through the day here, so by the afternoon all of the little seedlings look parched and droopy. I am enjoying walking out the back  to offer them a sprinkling of water from the hose each afternoon.

This afternoon something was not right. My smoothly raked garden bed looked like a moonscape pitted with craters.

See all of those holes amongst my lettuces!

“WHO DID THIS?” I asked in my biggest voice.

This face might have given me the answer…

He’s still sitting in his bed in disgrace.

It’s Super

Today my boys headed off to buy two scoops of dirt for the new vegetable patch.

On their return I went out to have a look.

“Be careful!”, shouted Pip. “This is not just dirt. It’s superdirt*. It has a cape and everything.”

Luckily I kept my distance.

*Superdirt is the premium garden bed mix with lots of manure, compost and gravelly bits already in it.

Homegrown

So there it is…

right down the back of our yard.

It will be our very own vegetable garden and we are terribly excited about it.

We live on quite a large block of land, almost a quarter acre. This yard was fabulous when the kids were little. They enjoyed soccer games, cricket matches and badminton tournaments aplenty on this wide expanse of grass. Now, however it is just sucking up water and needing regular mowing. It has been a long time since the kids were just out the back and running around.

It seemed like a very good time to start doing something more productive with the space.

My Pete and I had long discussions about whether the garden bed would be two planks of wood high or whether he would make two beds, but eventually we made just one bed. It is a 2.4 metre square. It is a very good start. It will not surprise me at all, though, if my Pete build another one beside it in a couple of weeks. He rarely does things by halves.

This weekend we will get a couple of trailer loads of soil to fill it, then be back to the hardware store to get seedlings.

I hope this rain we are having hangs around until the plants are in the soil.

Then again… I quite like the idea of standing out there with the hose.

PS those people who voted for a deck… what a great idea! That might be the next thing I have my Pete doing while I prance about looking busy.

Working Together

Our backyard project continues to develop very nicely.

While my Pete did stuff with drills and clamps and hammers and a variety of other tools…

I roamed around the backyard and took photographs of butterflies resting on our trees.

It’s a partnership that works for us!

Easter Projects

What is it about a four day weekend that has you dreaming up projects that will still need your attention long after the Easter break has finished?

Yesterday my Pete and I bravely ventured to an enormous hardware store on one of their busiest days of the year and came home with the car loaded with these:

They made the car smell so good and eathy! I did need to vacuum the passenger seat after though, for fear of the next passenger getting a rather uncomfortable splinter!

Now they sit in the backyard awaiting the next step in our project.

Very exciting!

Passage of time

Isn’t it funny – the ordinary, mundane events that can mark the passage of time?

Today my bottle of perfume ran out.

For some time I have watched the line of liquid get lower and lower behind the pink glass. This morning there was barely enough for my required daily application of scent before I went to work.

This event is neither interesting nor noteworthy in the general context of the life, but to me it represents more than an empty bottle.

I bought this bottle of perfume last year, in the first days of October, while I was in France. I stood in the Sephora shop in St Quetin with Ashy as she bought me bottle after bottle to squirt onto the strips of tester card. We sniffed and compared, some were discarded very quickly, others made it to the “interesting’ pile, then eventually we settled on this one. I paid for it in Euros, trying to spend the last of the local currency before we flew home.

Each day since then I have worn this perfume. A sniff of my arm returns me to that store and the exacting process of choosing just the right scent.

Now that it has run out I am one further step removed from that day, from that holiday, from the cool days of Europe in my big red coat and black scarf.

This bottle emptying marks a passage of time. I have bought another bottle – exactly the same, but it came from the pharmacy down the road at the local shopping centre. It smells the same, but using it doesn’t have the same associations. This new bottle belongs to a perfunctory occasion – it was part of a shopping list that included ordinary family items.

The other was just for me. It was special, completely indulgent.

I liked that.

Easter Cushions

I have been creating. My obsession with buying charm squares has left me with a few left over bits and pieces and it was time to put them to good use.

These two little Easter cushions took all of an hour to make last night.

Tiny scraps of fabric is all they need.

Best of all…

their calorie count is zero.

If you want to make one too your free pattern is here. Just try to avoid chocolate as you sew in order to fully benefit from the lack of calories!