November: a late turnaround.

I really felt in November like the tide finally turned in my life and good things happened. Read on in anticipation!

I did have a sort of busy month but just at normal levels. I had time and energy to spend a Sunday arvo helping with creche kids at another church. I brought flare to the room setup.

Workwise, pretty calm this month. I normally try and achieve some stuff by the end of the year, and I was hoping to wrap up another kids book, but that hasn’t been possible and I’ve just pushed it to next year. This year has definitely been a challenge right across the college. When I reflect back on 5 years ago, we’ve come a long way in our capacity and the quality of our work, but most people I talk to are feeling pretty exhausted. The drought and now the bushfires have added difficulty to peoples work as well. I don’t feel like I can do much in emergency responses but they keep asking for volunteers so I’ve just done the Em-train courses, just in case they get desperate. But as I said, my own workload has settled back to normal routine, not stressful.

At the start of the month builders came in and knocked down some walls and put a door hole in. So the office theme has been dust. At the end of the month, we still have a door hole, hopefully doors to be added soon. The progress on this office refurb is tedious, I was racing the door build against my orchid flower, and the flower won. I feel like the list of things they want to do will drag out over the next 3 years in a hodgepodge and constantly disruptive way. It took all year to get a door. So I can only imagine the timeline for carpets, lights, cubicles. Sigh. 

The state of the office:

The orchid and the door hole.

 

Anyway luckily (or maybe it was good planning) the worst day of construction was the day my team travelled down to Yanco for our NSW team get-together. My 3rd trip down there this year and the last for a while. It went well, I did some presentations on social media and on taking videos on phones. I was well prepared and other than having to stop for the stupid melbourne cup race, which I am not into at all, I was happy with how it went. But it was a more tiring workshop than when I just sit back and go along for the ride. 

At one point during the sessions our exec videod in and amongst all the big picture stuff she mentioned that some of the highlights from our team that she had really enjoyed this year, the good stories she was telling, one was the ARTP anniversary (including the book I wrote), I think another one was the website or something I was involved in, and she also said that Tocal social media was excellent, it was “leading DPI”. So she didn’t name me but it was a nice boost that all my hard work this year has been a good contribution.

We had an excursion to a cotton gin, and I don’t know much about cotton so that was interesting. Ask me about cotton.

We had dinner one night at a local historic venue a bit like Tocal on the Murrumbidgee, which was lovely, had lovely gardens to explore. 

When we got back I tried to go to work the next day, but I had a massive crash, tired and teary, so took a flex afternoon and slept, but was better after that. I think that with the health issues I have I am more prone to getting exhausted from long days. Thankfully I can sustain full time work, but when it was travel and long days, or I do quite physical things, I get noticeably fatigued. It's like a thinner wall between me and tiredness than it used to be.

I’ve been growing seedlings and although some died during my travels away some survived, so I have been able to replace my finished poppies with eggplants, and get a handful of flowers started. I wanted more flowers, not sure if I have time to try and get some more going. There have been some brutally hot days already.

Before:

Summer ready! The white poly pipe is a composting system Cass gave me, I've wanted to try direct in-ground composting for ages.

Now the best news! I am an Aunty. Lucy was born on Sunday 10 November in Singleton. She came a few weeks early but fat and healthy. I took the day off on Tuesday and visited with Mum. Julia is already an amazing mum. She can wrap that baby like any midwife, I call it burrito. I gave them a bag of snacks and I ate Luke's lunch, which wasn't very helpful of me, but I did go and pick up their car.  It was the day they predicted catastrophic fire conditions, so we did get cut off coming home but thankfully there were no fires along the back road so we got home in 90 minutes all up. Julia was a bit short on baby clothes the right size so that was the perfect excuse for me to finally go baby clothes shopping as soon as we got home! I have to say that Lucy is a pretty good baby. 

We had a family dinner (minus Heather) the next weekend for Matt's bday, had chinese food and played Speculation, watching Lucy sleep on the baby monitor. 

 I was invited to Parliament House for National Ag Day to celebrate with DPI by launching this book they do each year of basically nice infographic reports on all the commodities. And they highlight some related good stories out of DPI as well and so they invited me and Jo for the Schools Program, Charlotte the chook being featured on the Eggs page. At first I said no, because I just wanted no more work travel this year, and I had a pretty busy week. I was going to see a play with JK, Christmas at Pemberly, and there was a colleagues farewell. But then I thought, I'm not going to get invited again and I really should take every chance to get out of Tocal and I always enjoy Sydney when I get there. It helps to not get stagnant just because it takes so much effort to get out of Tocal. And also, I thought I had kind of been craving some recognition for this years work, so I should accept it when it actually comes!

The trip down was horrendous. I had booked an XPT train/coach seat. ON the day there was an accident that cut the highway all day so I ended up going down on regular cityrail except it was SO MUCH WORSE because bus replaced trains on the hunter line so it took 90 minutes to get to Newcastle. But once on the train, it went smoothly and I still love the central coast line so much.

This was the food at Parliament House.

This is me and Jo with our triumphant Charlotte.

Julie was also invited and Jennifer snuck in. I met some people I wouldn't normally, like a Japanese consul economist. Felt a bit out of my depth but it was good to do.

I forgot to report on my health. Since I saw the nutritionist in October I have been cutting out sugar and taking a few supplements to lower acidity. The only fruit I eat is berries for example. And it has actually helped! Pretty much straight away I just felt brighter and better. Over the month of November I noticed less joint tenderness, less tiredness, my guts didn't trouble me (except after eating badly like a schnitty and chips). So this is my life now. I am basically eating a paleo diet. This is one of my cheats, we went to the Lindt cafe while in Sydney. But otherwise I have been really sticking to it because there is nothing like feeling good to motivate change.

The current version of the progesterone pill I changed to could have contributed but I really doubt it. It's messing my cycle around and normally that would make my guts sore and irritated, but they aren't. So there must be something in that whole thing about sugar being inflammatory, and now my gut is "healing" everything feels a lot better.

I've started going to pilates at the physio on Saturday mornings. It's good to have a workout that makes me tired and is beneficial for my back issue and is gentle and easy to get into.

This week I thought would be same same every day, but turns out there was a kids event at the college and Costa was there and I was asked to ask him to speak to a video about why biosecurity is important for the environment. It was pretty hard. But when I eventually got the time with him he was great. The video will be very useful! I'm glad I didn't know about this in advance, it would have stressed me out so much. Thankfully it was just 3 stressful hours.

Yesterday (Saturday) I went back to Singleton to visit Lucy again and I got to wake her up for her feed, and I had another game of Speculation with Julia and Luke which was a game I didn't really master the first time but this time I won. I would like to try and visit Lucy every month, so that I don't miss her growing up.

I haven't mentioned all the good things that have happened this month. Mum's health is better, good things are happening in my best friends lives, I've been enjoying Christmas shopping, I've got plans to sell and buy musical instruments next year... meanwhile I anticipate a pretty chill December.

October mostly nothings.

I'm ahead of the month end this month! This weekend is quiet, next weekend is busy. 

I finished a small knitting project.

I watch less TV. I spend a lot of my rest time on the couch, listening to podcasts and looking at my garden and reading books and eating my meals and doing admin and pretty much everything happens here.

I did some big $$ shopping! Ziera went into administration so I bought a pair of boots for next year. They were a good discount so it was a good time to buy anyway but I would have delayed purchasing if not gripped by fear of having no orthotic shoes to buy in the future.

I also bought a raincoat, after 18 months of agonising.

The occasion was the Riverlights festival which was a bit rainy but still wonderful.

This is my name in Tamil.

Another special night out was seeing Much Ado About Nothing at Newcastle Civic Theatre. I've seen this play several times, I think I saw it last year by Upstage, it's one of my favourites. 

Now to important garden news! I picked a large bunch of paper daisies from my garden!

I've been fighting aphids on my roses!

I didn't expect to get any irises because I recently dug them up and separated them, but I got 2!

I've had poppies from June non stop! They are starting to thin out now as we get hot days but the last flush has been gorgeous.

I took a bunch of garden flowers down to Elsie when I saw her new place, and also cooked a huge batch of soup for G, and we had brunch in Lane Cover.

I found driving to Sydney and back in the one day extremely tiring, it was raining and holiday traffic. I've been realising that I now have to pay a recovery price for hard things. A hard driving day, then a couch day. The arthritis has been pretty good this month, although starting to heat up the last couple of days.

I've been looking out for a garden bench, and spotted some vintage chairs on Facebook and bought them last Saturday. It was a nice drive out to Seaham to get them as well. I love having such cute, cheap, reused chairs.

I've started doing another kids book at work.

I also got inside a tractor one day. And went to the dairy another day.

This is some family, on mums birthday, after she got out of hospital. I took a day off work and hung out at the hospital with her after her surgery.

I signed up for hello fresh, because I have been suddenly bored of my slow cooker food. Even the smallest box takes me ages to eat, and the cooking is time consuming, but it does taste good.

I've been to the nutritionist about arthritis and I'm goign to try and cut down on sugar for a month. So some changes to my shopping. Berries instead of bananas. Paleo bread instead of sourdough. It's doable in my home cooking and food prep, but hard when eating out.

Finally, yesterday it was really hot and windy, and whilst I mostly watched TV and did washing, I did go to the baths with JK and JM and had my first swim of the summer! It said it was 18, but it was nice, maybe the pool had warmed up in the sun. My joints are hot, I love to cool them down in water.

We had pizza and watched the tide come in.

And that's it! A pretty short post.

September things.

The shape of September has been finishing the ARTP book, which was my last big capacity stretching job for the season, then switching in to unwind mode for the rest of the year! If you want to see my book or learn about aboriginal training in agriculture, its a free download and we printed a few hundred hard copies.

So, I may not have shared photos of my first tulips yet! Enjoy.

I started summer flower seedlings and eggplants as well, but due to a lot of travel this month they all died except the eggplants, and the sweet peas which I had already planted outside.

I finally saw the rheumatoid arthritis specialist, in Newcastle. As it happens the 3 months I waited to see him everything got better, I reckon it had been 6 weeks since my last sore fevery spell, and there was sort of nothing to examine when he poked all my joints. But I read out my list of indicators I had recorded on my phone and also there was the blood test, so he has gone with early stage inflammatory arthritis, which will come and go, come and go, and when it comes and stays then he will treat it. But the great thing is that now I can see him any time. If I get a flare up next week, I can call up. Next check in is december. Then I popped to the string shop again and bought a dampening thing for the G string and talked about upgrading my cello one day.

My traditional reward for going to health things in newcastle is Heritage Gardens on the way home, I had lemon meringue pie for lunch and looked at blueberry plants, and magnolias, which are on my wish list at the moment.

A flowery native bush called my eye so I bought it and planted it next to my lavender. Starting a bee friendly patch.

I would like to finish this tapestry. I'm going to leave it on the table and not get netflix in the hope that I finish it in the next 12 months. So far, slow. I've sat down at it twice.

Coralie's hens night was held and was tasty and fun!

My annual Mudgee holiday was timed for after my book went to the printer. It was pretty rainy at first so I read a book and did some family stuff to help out. They had a sick sheep and a lot of things all on the one day so it was good to just read and help.

I'm pretty good friends with the kids now after maybe 5 visits, it's fun being around them.

I really enjoyed Big Little Lies, it is Australian and very satisfying. I'm pretty out of the loop on best selling books (I mostly listen to Her Royal Spyness mysteries on Audible) so everyone has already read it except me, but if you haven't, go read it, I would repurchase. I also read Where have all the boys gone, set in Scotland. And I had a free book on Audible, The Rosie Project, which I finished yesterday, and also recommend, it's a cross between the Curious incident of the dog in the night and a rom com, and also Australian. Dry yet sweet.

Just some heifers escaped from up the road.

I did also get out of the house! One day I had a relaxation massage and browsed the shops and my usual cafe, and the next day Helen and I went to lunch at a winery and more shopping.

I bought myself this beautiful clock which doesn't tick. My ticking clock from kmart has been getting on my nerves in my quiet house. I also bought a little bitty butter dish which I have always wanted a small one. I looked for ideas for baby presents as well.

As you can see, poppies are still going. I could plant them earlier I reckon. They have been flowering since June and still heaps of buds now its October.

So I decided to not buy a baby gift but paint a personal portrait of Sven for the Wilsons. It was hectic to get back from Mudgee and paint it before going to Spotlight, Olive Tree Markets and then the party on Saturday afternoon but it worked out well thankfully.

Here are some beautiful photos from the party taken by Bronte.

I got to the party and had to decide if I would hang out with old people, parents, or youths. I chose youths. We now have a tradition of taking "Sleepover club" photos whenever we are together. This is the first. But we later recruited a 5th member.

I've added another plant and beautiful pot to my house. The pot is from Henry and Tunks, and the plant is from Fancy Plants. It has been a long time since I bought a new plant. It's because I am obsessed with ceramics.

Then I had a couple of days at Tocal then I went down to Yanco again for the Aboriginal celebration which was special. On the way I bought myself a coffee, a mocha, I didn't like it and I didn't notice an improvement of my energy so I would not repurchase. Give me tea any day. That is my keep cup in a coffee machine as proof though.

The other thing I enjoyed about the trip was getting to know colleagues I was travelling with. It was much more fun than last month when I went on my own.

I got a coldsore. Not surprising with all this running around. Oh the other thing was my cycle went all out of whack, the progesterone pill was good for a few months but then suddenly went a bit bad like the Mirena, and by the end of September my stomach was super sore again from probably my weird uterus stuff and all the heavy food I ate travelling and the wedding, so I've just been given another type of progesterone to try. Anyway. I've been all a bit physically weary and gross and not surprising I had a coldsore.

Then it was back home again, and Saturday was Julia's baby shower, which was a happy morning tea of her friends and family, and I am thankful I didn't have to organise it. It would have been a lovely thing to do but it was beyond my capacity this month. Her friend from church did a wonderful job.

Then I had a quick turnaround and went to Coralie's wedding! It was a lovely wedding, C and her family did a wonderful job, it was all comfortable and relaxed and fun and pretty. Thankfully I fitted into my dress from 2 years ago.

The expanded Sleepover Club, second portrait.

Paterson School of Arts hall was a beautiful venue.

And everything was as it should be, cake cutting, sweet speeches, fun dancing, 10pm finish.

I'm ready to take life down a few gears until the end of the year. I'm ready for daylight savings and long lazy evenings. I'm ready to have routine around exercise and eating healthy. I'm ready to rearrange my furniture again.

My roses are now 1/4 of the way up the pergola.