52 Blessings - Week 13

Well I’m one quarter of the way through the year with this little photo challenge and still going reasonably strong. Following on from last week’s hard yakka in the backyard, we’ve gotten a few tube stock plants from the Greening Australia Nursery at The Gap. It’s on the other side of Brisbane and a fair drive for us but well worth the effort. It is a literal gold mine for native gardening enthusiasts as they are a wholesaler which sells direct to the public. For the same price that we would expect to pay for a mature plant at a retail nursery, we got two mature plants and 12 tube stock tufted grass plants to add to our new garden bed. I really love native plants and with gorgeous coloured flowers, such as on the Melaleuca thymifolia below, they make a wonderful addition to any garden.

Just think of all the meat!

It’s a sad day in blogging world when the most exciting thing I can think of to write about is my new freezer. :$ You can blame Tina for that though, since she was desperate to see a photo of it. LOL

After years of putting up with a tiny freezer space in my fridge, I finally bit the bullet and got a dedicated vertical freezer. I can finally do a proper bulk meat shop and make my own chunky pet meat which the cats are absolutely thrilled about - if they could actually get excited about freezers, that is. For the same amount that I would pay for five days of pet meat for both cats, I can make a whole kilo which will feed them both for about a month.

Even better, it has a five star energy rating and has lovely clear plastic drawers, so no more sifting through the freezer space trying to find what I’m after. Even Mojo has given his seal of approval.

52 Blessings - Week 12

To be quite honest, this morning I woke up and couldn’t think of much to be grateful for. My muscles were sore and stiff from yesterday’s work shovelling pine bark into buckets, carting them up the driveway and up the back slope to the new garden bed. It was hard, repetitive work made worse by the midday sun and worse still by the intermittent heavy showers that would pass over. Mind you, only for long enough that the road was soon steaming in the sun that followed. I was cursing myself for the block that our house is built on…..cursing the builder for raising the level of the block….cursing the builder again for not having adequate side clearance along the side of the house so we could have the trailer in the backyard. All in all, I felt a little over it.

But this afternoon, after planting in our newly acquired grevilleas, I felt a real sense of achievement. The weeds are pretty much gone, we have a lovely new garden bed and we have done it without the aid of professionals. I’m sure that a professional landscaping could have done a better job….but there is a certain element of satisfaction gained from doing hard work yourself. I guess I’m just grateful I do have the ability to do hard work….so many others would love to be able to and cannot. It’s like my Dad used to say, be thankful for the aches and pains you feel when you are able-bodied - it means you are alive.

(Don’t ask me what that white spot is - I don’t have the foggiest!)

Musical cats

I must have been living under a YouTube rock. How could I not have heard of Nora, the piano playing cat? She has her own website, coffee mugs, posters and apparently heaps of fans. She has even been on the news surprisingly. Having watched the video, I’m wondering what all the fuss is about. What I see Nora doing, although very cute and adorable, is not really that out of the ordinary. Considering the large number of videos submitted of “piano playing cats”, how could you consider it extraordinary?

When I was growing up, we always had a piano but the cats came later at various stages. The first to tinkle the ivories was Mr Puss, the grand old fellow in the tuxedo fur coat. He loved to sit on the corner of the piano and listen to my sister play and during the night, if we left the lid up, you would hear him rubbing the keys with his head or his paw. I think he just loved the sound really.

Mojo on the other hand, being the proverbial curious cat, would run along the keyboard perpetually wondering how it all worked. If we lifted the top up, so he could see the hammers and strings, he would sit there fascinated as my sister played. I’m not much of a piano player myself but even my limited repertoire of Twinkle Twinkle, Chopsticks and Heart and Soul never failed to amuse him and he would add in his own little notes every now and then. I think you will find most cats brought up in houses with pianos will display the same fondness for the keys and the sounds they make. Even once they find the answer to the question - what is making that noise - they still are amused by it.

Running in the buff

No, I haven’t turned into a nudist, nor am I running a marathon naked.

This morning I woke up to find Mojo’s collar in pieces on the ground. Yes it was getting a little ratty but I was hoping to get just a little bit extra wear out of it since it was a fairly exxy one that I only got last year. Last year when I adopted Rosie, I found his collar on the ground in much the same state as this one. I really do think that he was trying to tell me that if she got to have new clothes, then so would he, thank you very much. Rosie on the other hand didn’t really mind about getting a new collar - she slept through the entire exchange and is now sporting a pretty purple one. Mojo of course will be having a blue one again….we found out a few years ago that it’s his favourite colour as it is the only colour collar that will stay on for more than a few days without mysteriously being lost, never to be found again. I can hear you all laughing at me now but cats do have favourite colours, I swear it! LOL

In the meantime, my cranky old man cat is still naked as the day he was born. I think he is secretly revelling in his collarless-ness. Hopefully he’ll come back in from the cat park soon so I can redress him….I really dread coming home late tonight after my shift to be surprised by him in the laundry.

52 Blessings - Week 11

This past week has been another crazy one with a mad dash down to rural NSW for a family event in the tiny one horse town of Quirindi. I love seeing new parts of Australia so it was a perfect excuse to extend the trip a little more than necessary and spend a few days in Dubbo, just for something different. On advice from some lovely Warwick locals I met at work, we headed west past Ipswich, south to Warwick and then further west to Goondiwindi and took the Newell Highway down to Dubbo. It made for a much quicker trip than the route we were planning on taking. But boy was it boring as far as landscape is concerned. No hills. No mountain ranges. Just flat plains, some planted with crops, as far as the eye could see. Oh and of course, B double trailers by the score. On the way home, we decided to go up the New England Highway instead which was just lovely in comparison. We didn’t get to see too much of the New England region on our return home but it would be nice to go back down to Glen Innes and stay a few days and see more of the area.

I guess if you have ever done any fairly long trips over a short course of days, you’ll know the kind of fatigue that sets in after several days of being constantly on the go. We had ten hours to Dubbo the first day, the next day off sight-seeing and visiting the zoo, then the next day four hours to Quirindi and finally a good seven hour drive home. Although we loved visiting NSW, we were grateful to Cunningham’s Gap looming ahead of us. From there, we knew we only had an hour to go and it truly was a sight for sore eyes. I couldn’t get a decent shot from the other side of the gap due to dense foliage but I did get a snap coming down the other side.

52 Blessings - Week 10

Yesterday was International Women’s Day and oddly enough, it coincided with a weekend away with the girls up at Bribie Island. Now what happens on Bribie, stays on Bribie and therefore, you won’t find any juicy details here. Sorry to disappoint!

All up, we had around 12 women from right across the eastern states of Australia, converging on one tiny island north-east of Brisbane. I really don’t think the residents knew what hit them to be honest! When I think about it, we are a pretty diverse bunch at all stages of life - grandmothers, mothers and non-mothers (like me!) alike. It made for an interesting experience and I’m sure we won’t forget it in a hurry. It also made me appreciate where I am in life right now. Things might not be perfect - I have a dirty great hole in the backyard, a job I don’t really like and a horrid commute to work. But in the general scheme of things, it really is ok and there is nothing wrong with my life right now that I don’t have the power to change in some way.

Our opinions of this errr…..interesting piece…varied, much like our differences in ages and lifestyles. So in salute to Bribie Island, I present the humble, chicken pie sculpture.

Trust me - the real thing is much, much more scary!