Category Archives: ponderings

losing a friend…

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… but gaining a place to visit.
Merrill is on her way to her new home in Victoria right now.
She decided that the climate in Tasmania didn’t suit her health-wise and that the artist inside her was crying for an environment more conducive to creating.
Here’s hoping that Victoria is that environment.
It does sound lovely… and the adventure! I envy her the excitement of a new home, a new place, meeting new people. I think its a wonderful opportunity and glad she decided to go for it.
I convinced her to start a blog so I set one up for her this afternoon. Take a look and tell me what you think:
I’ll let her explain the title.
Meanwhile I’ve been feeling rather seedy lately. I’ve been flirting with the flu for about a week now – I got the sore throat, the headache, the chills, the dry coughing which keeps me up half the night. I didn’t get the fever luckily.
As a result though, I haven’t done much. Then again, I could blame Merrill and having a guest for not getting anything done…
Or the fact that Wayne’s away so I have to do everything around here on my own. Nothing makes you appreciate the other person as much as taking on their chores.
I got home yesterday and spent 2.5 hours feeding chickens, horses, dogs and ducks, burying a wallaby one of my dogs killed in the morning, turning on the pump and watering the paddocks, flipping to the other pump to fill the tank, watering the vegie patch…
I was exhausted by the end of it. 
What made things take longer was the fact the Ben is down the road currently, at boot camp. He’s with a friend who’s teaching him manners and giving him experience having someone on his back (and not throwing them off).
Here’s hoping I get a horse I can actually ride at the end of it.
However, having him down the road adds to the chores as I have to drive down and feed him twice a day… not as easy as walking down to the paddock to feed the horses.
So I have nothing new to share. No new projects. No new decorating or crafting. I did manage to sort the lids in the plastics cupboard. I was sick of the mess in there so I used two ice cream tubs to hold lids.
Nothing too exciting.
Next item on the agenda: organise the pots cupboard and the lids in there…
 
and organise the pantry…
Baby steps…
z

pretty things make it home

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Do you remember the heart wreath I made for our front door as a welcome? Well, I loved it, but Wayne kept knocking it around as he came and went. So in the end I gave it to a friend as a housewarming present and hung up something new…
Wayne made this and its the perfect front door decoration! Just my kind of thing.
Have I mentioned how great Wayne is? Yesterday I asked him to price an air staple gun for my birdproofing the house and he came home with one for me! 
Nothing melts a girl’s heart like power tools!
Its a big week next week. Merrill is moving to Victoria and I’m helping her sell stuff before her move, adopting some of her stuff for us, and organising to make room for things here! I’m buying her old leather sofa and armchairs (cause its leather!) and 2 of her bookcases.
The headache… We have too much stuff. This is not a big house. Four bedrooms, but not big bedrooms. In fact, the smallest bedroom is so small you have to go outside to change your mind.
ha. ha.
I’ve always wanted to say that.
Now I have and I apologise.
Anyway, small bedrooms, a huge living room but too much furniture. I like things to look pretty and this place ain’t pretty. Yet.
I have pretty corners. Like this one on the coffee table…
And this one on the other coffee table…
But I have plans. I’ve sold my grey couch. I’m donating the single bed and tons of clothing and bedding to the fire relief. The other couch and the recliner are both looking scared. 
I plan to make more room in here so I can feel the space. And the smallest bedroom will soon be a walk in wardrobe!
Stay tuned!
z

what do the internet and potted herbs have in common?

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 I’ve been having some time off blogging.
Some of it was voluntary. I actually made a decision to not blog for a few days last week. Then a couple of other days I didn’t blog cause I was too busy doing other things… like… living.
Then I had some internet connection issues which caused me to mutter under my breath a lot and storm out of the office in disgust repeatedly.
The internet issues are continuing currently but I’m on the netbook, connected to the modem directly via a red umbilical cord. I can’t move from this chair if I want to be online.
At least I’m online, right? It would be better if I could remember my email password so I could log on to my webmail.
That’s the thing when you get too comfortable with your own computer. You set up your passwords in the computer memory (probably a really bad thing if you let others on your computer!) and you log in to sites on a permanent basis. ie no need to actually remember passwords.
Now I have to search for the safe place I wrote my password.
But I may have the situation under control before I need to panic.
See, I’ve been having internet connectivity problems for a while now. A couple of months for sure. Some days it worked fine. Other days I couldn’t log on at all. When it was bad I couldn’t log on to the Activ8me website to get the phone number to call… When it was working fine I would think ‘eh, its ok now, why call?’
Yesterday afternoon I finally snapped and called. I spoke to a nice man in India who said that the only way to get to the bottom of the problem was to disconnect the router and hardwire the computer into the modem direct.
Great. That means only one computer in the house has internet access for the period.
(Guess who’s?)
So I crawl around on my knees, unplugging bits and pieces and plugging other bits in. I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say that step 1 didn’t work. I had to spend a second day, talking to another nice man in India, in order to set up the netbook to actually connect using the red umbilical cord.
Now that’s working. I’ve been putting it through its paces and so far no dropouts.
Step 1 seems to show that the satellite dish is working fine.
Tomorrow I’ll call again and see what the next step is. It could be the router. It could be the little silver box thingy on the modem cable.  Whatever it is,  I have finally gotten someone to confirm my suspicions:
That the satellite dish is interfering with the TV antenna and our reception. 
Sigh.
Why is it that when I say something is a problem I get pooh-poohed, but when someone else says it it makes sense?
Anyway, on another subject entirely, I made these little hanging baskets for outside the casita a few weeks ago and never got around to sharing them.
I used some old colanders I’d been collecting for a while with this project in mind, and some chains bought from the hardware store. I then lined the colanders with hanging basket fibre, added potting mix and put in basil and coriander.
I made one double hanging basket and 2 single ones which I hung on either side of the casita door.
You may have noticed my collection of pot plants below the double hanging basket. I actually I had to move all my pots there to get them out of the worst of the sun before they died.
Notice the barbed wire clover Wayne made me? He called it a flower, but its a four leaf clover. That’s ok by me. I can use the luck!
Anyway, this is how my plants looked 2 weeks ago. Since then the coriander has died and the basil is looking sickly.
I never have luck growing herbs. I don’t know what I do wrong but they just don’t seem to like me much. I give them pretty pots to live in and they repay me by dying.
hmph.
z

yeah, no…

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There’s a very common expression here in Australia which kinda doesn’t make sense when you first hear it…
“Yeah, no.”
You hear it everywhere. Confusing? Not really. Its pretty simple – it means “Yes, I hear you, but no, I don’t agree.”
Merrill said it the other day and that’s when she realised she’d been living in Australia too long. I, on the other hand, have been saying it for so long I’ve lost track…
The weather has cooled down a lot since since the heatwave of last week which left me in a puddle in front of a fan and an evaporative cooler. On Tuesday I had to stop painting when the paint flew off my brush in the wind. And yesterday it was downright cold outside.
Today its meant to be 20-26 degrees, overcast and possibly some early showers… I hope for no showers as I want to get out and start painting again. But its still pretty cool and very windy. 
How do house painters do it? If I was a house painter I’d starve to death. I think I’d only be able to work about 10 days out of 365…
Speaking of painting, I started a commission yesterday since it was a non-house-painting day.
This is a portrait of a friend’s dogs. I’m doing this in return for 2 adirondack chairs and a matching table which her husband makes. Cool swap huh?
This is stage 1 of the portrait:
And this is one of the chairs he makes. Mine will be painted solid turquoise and will sit on our deck facing the dam.
We visited their house on New Year’s Eve for the first time. She has a cute little ‘secret garden’ thing happening which I love.
A cray pot with a cute tiny ivy growing through it houses a family of wrens. I took some of that ivy but I don’t think any of it survived the heatwave… 😦
A few cute weathered fence paling bird houses hang in arbours or off trees.
Cute fountains here and there..
Driftwood sculptures and washed up marine objects decorate the garden – what else would you have in a seaside cottage?
I better go outside and check the wind strength vs my ability to keep paint on my brush.

z


smokin’ hot

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This was the view from our front porch 2 nights ago. The bushfire started at Lake Repulse by idiot campers who didn’t put out a campfire (great name for a holiday destination huh? “Hey honey, lets go to Lake Repulse for a weekend getaway”….) spread down towards Ellendale and all the way down to Bushy Park. 
Fortunately for me, Fentonbury was spared although the fire went within 1 kilometre of the house.
The smoke has been hanging around the entire Derwent Valley and Hobart for days now, but we’ve been lucky. Nothing like what happened with the fires down south where a whole town burned down and thousands of people had to be evacuated by boat cause the roads were all closed. People had to stand in the sea to escape the flames which burned right down to the beach.
Its wierd. Here I am watching the news, seeing images of the fires and thinking “that doesn’t look that bad, they’re just small fires”… nothing like the huge fireballs in Victoria a few years ago which burned out King Lake and killed so many people. Compared to those fires, these were piddling little fires.
Seems the size of the fire doesn’t have to be so BIG to do a ton of damage…
We’ve been fine here but it really does make you realise that there are certain things you should have when you choose to live in the country. For instance, on Wind Dancer Farm we have bore water so we have ample water to defend our house and our animals. But without power we’d be lost like everyone else. We really need to buy a generator to run the pump. Cause if there was a fire in our valley we’d have to give serious consideration to what we’d choose to do… if a fire was coming down the hill behind us and our road out was clear, we could just leave. We could take the dogs, but what about the horses?
If a fire was coming up from below us and closed off the road, we’d have no choice but to stay and fight. And to do that we’d need the pump to work.
Since we have pasture around the house and very few trees we think we could easily fight a fire around the house using our irrigation system.
We just need a generator.
Shopping list: 
1 petrol generator.
z

christmas eve

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…and all through the house, not a creature was stirrring…
.. wait. I hear the clinking of a spoon as Wayne finishes his dessert.
The dogs are flaked out all over the floor.
The table is set and all pretty for Christmas. (Love my op shop dishes)
 
I finished the gateleg table (sort of) so we can have a proper christmas dinner at a table somewhere other than in the kitchen.
Not that we have enough room in our living room for a table. I’ve had to move the couch back to Layout 101 to put the table in there. You’d think having one very big room would mean you have tons of space for everything… but we don’t. The wood heater takes up some space. Wayne’s office in the living room takes up more space… I dry clothes by the heater in winter.. we have two 3 seater couches and 2 recliner armchairs and 2 coffee tables. Its a miracle we can walk in there.
Anyway, back to the table… It was left at my house after the first lot of tenants left. It was broken and the glue holding the slats together has ‘let go’. I’ve fixed it for now but left the top as it was. I finished painting the legs, distressing it just enough to look natural. I also finished the two chairs so we have a non-matching set of 4 now.
(Yes, there are only 2 chairs at the table right now… I’m aware of that.)
The table settings is simple. Burlap placemats, lavender sprigs from our garden, tags and twine holding cutlery.
The house is clean (ok… well MOST of it is – as my mother would say ‘all the mother in law would see’ is clean).
I’ve forbidden Wayne from making a mess, from using the kitchen, from being inside…
Ok. Not that, but I made dinner so I wouldn’t have to clean up another mess. The one I cleaned earlier was more than enough, thankyouverymuch.
The pressies are on display in my minimal token nod to christmas – on the shelves in the living room.

This year I’ve gone for stencils on plain brown wrapping paper. For Wayne I’ve just numbered the presents so he opens them in the right order. The dangly thing is apparently mine – a whole lot of little parcels joined together on a string. Can’t wait to open them!
In case you’re wondering about the grey square on the wall… Well… when we moved in I chose that dark grey colour for a feature wall at the far end of the living room. I love it. Everyone who sees it loves it. The rest of the room is painted in that ‘meant to be light grey but looks more like light blue in that room’ colour. I don’t like that so much. 
I wanted a wall with shelves to put framed photos on display. I got some pine, cut it to size, painted it, got some decorative brackets, put them up… then thought, hm. That looks a bit plain. So I painted in a dark grey square behind the shelves.
Its different…
So. Resting now.
Tomorrow is CHRISTMAS!
z

getting the christmas spirit

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It was evading me for a while there.
I mean, it was really absent. I wanted to close up the house, park the car around the back, and pretend I wasn’t home.
It wasn’t a ‘bah humbug’ kind of thing. Just a ‘really tired and worn out’ kind of thing.
However, I seem to be snapping back to my usual hyperactive self. If the fact that I can no longer sleep at night is any indication…
This is what it was like inside my head for the past two nights:

I must clean the house. Vacuum. Might be easier to rip up and replace the carpet at this stage, its so dirty in there. Presents are wrapped. Where will I put the table for us to eat on? I have enough chairs… Should I re-arrange the living room furniture (run through 31 scenarios of where to move what). I really want to make the smallest room into a walk in wardrobe. How to do it? Should I try to build my own our of pallets or MDF? Adapt other objects (old doors, hardware shelving, old lockers)? Will 2 salads be enough for tomorrow or should I make a pasta salad as well? I need to find my bottle holder for a centrepiece on the table. Its in the shed. I think. That shed needs sorting out. Should I use that to store larger projects waiting to be worked on? The lawn really needs mowing. Are the baby birds out of the nests yet? Found another unfeathered dead one on the lawn last night. I want to remove the nests so I can clean the house and start painting. My office is a mess. Gotta change all the throws over the couches. And wash the dogs…
Sheesh.
Its exhausting being me.
I’ve just been so tired lately that I’ve had no desire (or energy) to tackle anything at all. But somehow, a couple of days ago I recaptured the need to be creative. I took out the old broken gateleg table my first tenants had left behind and started mending it planning to use it as a dining table for Christmas. Then, since I had only a bit of a tin of Stain Cover left and it was on the edge, I undercoated two kitchen chairs which have been waiting to be painted for about a year. I also went through some booty I’d collected from trips to op shops and tip shops over the last month or so. 
I’m back!
What really got the christmas juices flowing however, was going to my friend Amanda’s yesterday and making three batches of melomakarona! These delicious traditional greek christmas sweets are one of my favourite. I helped mom make them many times as I grew up but have only made them myself 3 times counting yesterday.
Here is the recipe I use and, let me tell you, its delicious and easy!
z

little miracles

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Yesterday I was out in the paddock with the horses and dogs when I heard laughter coming from the chicken coop. 
Wayne is the designated chicken feeder, putter-awayer at night, and egg collector. I love listening to him when he goes up there, filling up chicken feeders, calling the chooks…
“Chook chook chook… here you go…. No ducks! You’re a duck! Get out!” etc.
But then I heard laughter. Real belly laughter. 
This is why:
At first glance its just another egg, right?
But look again:
Its the smallest chicken egg in the world!
I’m still laughing!
I can picture it now:
The poor chicken that lays the huge eggs, straining and pushing, face all squinched up, leaving claw marks on the perch as she struggles to bring forth the monstrous eggs.
The chicken next door thinking “Eh, that’s big enough” and popping out the tiny egg…
Maybe she’s lazy. Maybe she’s going on strike – “Till we get better food, better working conditions, a new chicken coop, an entertainment centre with blu ray and wide screen TV – this is the size of eggs you’ll get from us.”
I love this egg!
I love all things miniature. I used to have a big miniature collection of anything tiny. There’s the (working) tiny spanner I have on the ute (truck to my american friends) key ring which Wayne gave me. I sold most of my miniatures a few years ago, all except the poodles, but this is one I want to keep.
Now… how best to preserve it… Boil it so its hard? Or punch holes and blow it empty which will mean no stinkiness if it breaks, but its much more fragile…?
z
PS. The tiny spanner:
P.P. S. OHHHHH NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

I broke it!

I was putting the eggs into the fridge and dropped it!!!!!!!!!!!!!

WAHHHHHHHHHHHH!

I’m so sad! 😦

day 25 – a day off

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And by that I mean a day where I slept in till 10am.

I no longer can sleep in till 10am. Not usually. On work days I get up at 6am and on weekends I feel the need to get up almost as early just so I can get things done.

Gone are the days of sleeping in till 2pm when I’d been out late the night before. Nowadays a late night is 10pm.

Getting old sucks. And I really needed the rest.

When I was young I’d hear about people working 2 or 3 jobs and I’d think “No thanks! One job will be enough for me when I grow up!”

And here I am now… 2 jobs and countless hobbies which keep me busy all the time.

No wonder I’m tired.

I had planned to go to the Royal Hobart Show today to help with poodles, but I was just feeling too average to go. Average sounds so much better than ‘icky’ and really, it implies that the rest of time you feel fabulous!

So, I slept in. Had brunch instead of breakfast… then pottered on down to the casita where I played with paint for a while.

Ahhh. That’s the life.

And its been raining all day so its been the kind of day where you just want to take it easy and listen to the raindrops on the roof.

Meanwhile at least a few things in my garden are growing. Here is the clematis. I planted 3 things on that trellis, this is the only one that survived.

Here are my prize flowers. I just love them! Granny’s bonnets or aquilegia.

 My purple daisies.

And my gorgeous baby snowball bush (vibirnum). Billy’s bush.

I’m not going to bother with what I did and didn’t cross off the list today cause, basically, I didn’t cross anything off!

Rest wasn’t on the list.

z

day 24 – its shameful

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I wish I could say this was the home of a hoarder I happened to know.

Alas, its my office.

What happened was I had to pile stuff when I decided to re-make Wayne’s office space in the living room. I had to take a desk and bookcase out… so I had to put things somewhere and the floor seemed as good a place as any.

There’s an ottoman you can barely see buried under the piles of stuff, its meant to be a visitor’s seat in the office. It basically holds the fabric up otherwise Barney will lie all over it and then I’ll have curtains covered in dog hair.

The other stuff… well, some of its projects in almost-progress. Some of it is wishful projects. The rest is stuff I need to sort through and find a place for.

As I said, I got rid of a desk and bookcase from in here so now I’m down some storage.

And stackable surfaces…

I have, however, organised a new, improved lot of storage… I’ve bought an old kitchen dresser (a cupboard) from a friend who’s moving. Its gorgeous. I have another similar to it in the living room. I need to make room for it in the office (by pushing aside piles of stuff) and then I’ll be able to sort and stash.

Meanwhile, the problem is I haven’t told Wayne about it. He’ll flip his lid. Another piece of furniture.

Maybe I can sneak it in without him noticing… hm… He doesn’t come into the office that often… maybe he won’t see if for a few weeks and by then I can say “What? That old thing? I’ve had that for ages!”

What I did today:
I had a LONG day at work, ending with a meeting after work.
Bought chicken for the dogs and spent what seemed like hours up to my elbows in raw chicken frames, bagging them up into one day meals to freeze.
Went to a work Trivia Night. We came second. Always come second…
I downloaded and installed Google Chrome cause I was sick of the problems with Firefox.
I moved my desk in a fit of rage when the internet and FF kept playing up, so I basically just added to the mess in the office.

What I didn’t do:
Cross much off my list. Seems I added more just to cross it off and that doesn’t count.

z