August: spring relief.

It is very much spring in every way now. The days are getting longer, my garden is full of flowers! And it’s rainy and I have no plans so its the perfect day to blog. 

I picked my 7 lemons! And made Lemon Butter and a double batch of slice, which was pretty much a whole day of baking. But its my favourite thing to do with lemons, a lovely gift to share with people, so it’s worth it. Otherwise my lemons would sit in the fridge because what else is worthy of them? 

At the start of the month my roses had buds.

My first tulips bloomed, and poppies and the usual flowers are bringing me a lot of joy. I am also starting some seedlings for summer flowers and eggplant. I don’t usually do much in summer because of the heat but I will give it a shot this year.

The veggie garden is amazing right now. I’ve got beetroot to pick, kale, silverbeet, and a huge tomato bush flowering already.

One particularly nice Saturday I visited my brother (with Dad to fetch a car back) and then I went to the flower markets. I haven't been there in a very long time, after my original obsession wore off. They have expanded into a nearby warehouse and now have a greenhouse for plants, a cafe, a play room, and some small providors doing sour dough and cheese for sale. It was excellent. I bought a few things as well as a huge bunch of pink flowers I shared with mum.

A church girl had her 21st at Nelson Bay. It was really nice to be invited and hang out in the sun with them.

Another Saturday I went to the Aroma festival with church friends, it was super super windy, but that kept the numbers down. I bought heaps of bread and treats.

I've had a bare bulb on a lamp stand for a while since I finally demoted my ugly brown lamp shade to the garage. I haven't been able to find nice lamp shades anywhere. I finally discovered Early Settler has a small range, but not enough to my fancy compared to covering my own.

So I bit the bullet, bought a plain shade from bunnings and some spray glue from hot dollar, and did some craft.

It's all about careful cutting and gluing.

I'm really happy with the result!

It's fabric I bought from Nerida Hansen back in the boxing day sales. Linen. Brings me pride and joy now whenever I see it. 

It was a big month for work. I went to Sydney one Monday for a session on government advertising on social media. It was an experience. I met an interesting person who worked in births deaths and marriages.

The website was finished and I organised a photo cake to celebrate. 

Then I moved on to focus on the book I am writing and designing about the ARTP (Aboriginal Rural Training Program). This is a capacity building job for me, quite a learning curve, quite potentially stressful. 

I had to travel down to Leeton to gather material from the team there. I also had dinner with a cousin. This is the snow I flew over on the way down.

This is the little Rex plane I flew in.

This is the Roxy at Leeton.

This is my temp office.

This is the start of the long, tree-lined driveways to the Yanco Ag Institute. It has orange tree groves to the right as well.

I managed to eat a lot of food in my motel, but the morning I flew out I treated myself to a cafe breakfast, with orange juice farmed by the cafe owner. It was lovely and I took a bottle home to mum.

When I got back, my rose leaves had started to open!

And then I got a cold, so wasn’t able to push through on the book with all the material I had gathered until I was better.

The DND group I joined has started playing Werewolf Legacy, which is a form of Mafia that has a long story arc. We played that for the first time just before I got sick. I am looking forward to the next game next weekend!

At the end of the month, the roses are leafy little bushes! I am now wondering when they will start getting long climbing stems.

I had an intense week at work just trying really hard to bring the ARTP book into shape. I had a bit of a confidence crisis on Wednesday, maybe I was tired and sick of it. But got through that and it's almost finished I think. 

So on Thursday my manager suggested I do some short days, and I left mid afternoon and went to the art gallery. There was a Kathryn Del Martin exhibition (beautiful, but as my manager says, SCARY) and some Aboriginal art by local school children. The ARTP book has helped me learn more about Aboriginal cultures so I enjoyed that too.

I had afternoon tea at the gallery too. I unfortunately didn't bring a book! Maybe I should start "reading in cafes" again, because I have quite a few library books I still haven't read.

When I came out, there were police cars everywhere and a huge police response shutting down the main street in front of the gallery and town hall. Bizarre.

I've had a couple of floor scrubbing sessions this month. I figure if I scrub small sections each time I mop I will eventually do the whole floor. It is fiddly even with a long handled scrubber, but I love the result. Compare the left line with the right line. 

I have also had a plumber come and replace my flexi hoses and fix a leak in my ensuite sink. He came on one of my sick days so I got to see him work, I was impressed with him and glad that job is done now. I'm really tired of organising all these house things. I just had leaf free gutter guard put on yesterday, so that's another house job done. Before the end of the year I need to sort out the change of strata manager, and I would also like to steam clean my carpets. And then after that, I am done. I vow to do no more projects or maintenance next year. No painting walls or anything. This year has been huge, I've done the pergola and all the washers and the strata research and the gutter guard research and added shelves to my tea cupboard and scrubbed grout and I forget what else. Next year, I will sit back and just LIVE here. Take a 12 month break from the To Do list. I am happy with all my improvements, but I think I need to draw a line under it and take a break.

I've not done much exercise this month, with the travel and being sick. I did however have a pinched nerve thing in my right hip, tingly legs and tight numbing pain etc, maybe brought on by sitting around when I had a cold. Stretching to relieve it made me realise how tight I am! So I have started doing Down Dog app yoga a bit more regularly, and it has been good. After a week I felt less tight, and nerves much better. I'm working on my motivation to get back into Jillian, but at the moment I am bored with it. I might look into gyms and classes. Also I have my rheumatologist appointment next week, so hopefully I'll find out what is good to do for that. The first 6 months this year weren't great, and I think mild aches and so on make it a bit harder to want to exercise. Like maybe I should be swimming instead of Jillian. 

I really feel like I'm coming to the end of the stressful and busy season that started in April or maybe March. I'm planning to hopefully go to Mudgee in 3 weeks, after the book is finished, and then the rest of the year will be much more regular. I'll do another kids book, manage content and promotion, and see how they renovate my office and who comes in to work there. That will be interesting.

I'll finish with my view from the couch. Poppies, seedlings growing, flower pots being watered by rain. Good things.

July: gutters and art.

It's the 12 August, a Monday night, I'm in a motel in Leeton, and I think I MUST take the chance now to blog July or it wont happen. I already can't remember any significant thoughts. I had a quick glance and my photo. I wont post pictures of the dead bugs in my skylight before I cleaned it (which has improved my baths a lot, not looking at a bug cemetery), or the tip of my finger I almost cut off trying to cut pumpkin, or the samples of different gutter mesh I've recorded. That pretty much sums up the first half of July. I had a lot of baths, I cooked a lot of soup, and I got obsessed with keeping leaves out of my gutters.

I also got obsessed with how to clean the cement grout of my indoor tiles. The whole back living area. I've done small test patches. I've recently decided to commit to a long handled scrubber and do it myself manually.

As mentioned, I was bathing for relaxation. I also had permission to take a flex day every 2 weeks to destress. And decided I'm in too much in a stuffy rut, obsessing about floors and gutters and working in my dumpy office while other people have interesting lives, and I need to get out and about more. So one day I had a flex I decided to do a long walk. I considered walking to Morpeth, but the weather was unpredictably rainy, so I went over to newcastle and walked on the breakwall and around the foreshore to the ocean pool where I bought a scollop for lunch.

Then I had a brainwave, I was in town on a weekday! So the violin shop was open! And I bought a cello stand and a music stand.

The housemate bedroom is now the cello room, all properly set up. My previous arrangement was the small spare room, cello lying on floor or bed, and music propped on my easel.

On another flex, mum and I went to the picture framers to frame some little bird things, and there was new dogs!

I finally went to a school working bee where we have church, and I taped these stairs for painting. I remember on that day I also went for a walk in the morning with Fi, which is a new thing we've started doing on Saturday mornings sometimes, and visited mum and dad, which I'm doing more regularly now mum is sick. I've decided that feeling in a rut is a good reason to be around people more whatever the reason. The temptation is to go "I'm exhausted from all this stress I need to rest" but actually I think its better for me to rest around people, walking and jillian and cups of tea with mum and dad. Better for my mood and nicer all round. I no longer have Netflix anyway, since Coralie moved out. So anyway here are the church working bee stairs which I didn't really enjoy doing but it was good to turn up and help.

In the school holidays some home group gals went out for dinner at one of the fanciest restaurants in Maitland, which specialises in native ingredients. This tasty chocolate mousse has fancy native berries and things in it, and came in a spectacular cloche of mist.

Another church social thing was a Mafia night that I went along to with mostly younger people. I had a great time, though I wouldn't play it regularly, its too stressful. It might be interesting to do Mafia as a game with work people.

Speaking of work, au revoir office buddy Kate. We had a farewell lunch before she moved to Brisbane. I painted a card.

But don't worry, I saw Kate again soon!

I've had a few chances to get out of the office and brush up on my photography skills, one was taking photos of fences around the farm, and the other was a pasture field day at Singleton. I got some really good photos on the DSLR, this is just on my phone but you can see it was farmers and tractors and stuff. And windy.

I offered to get a short haircut with mum, because the chemo is thinning her hair, but she opted to keep her length, so I went for a long overdue bob. There was a new french bulldog puppy! Weird but delightful.

I bought the perfect vase for my youngest sisters 30th.

I also added 2 nice terracotta pots to my garden from Facebook Marketplace, the best shop ever. One will have my mulberry tree, the other might be a blueberry bush.

I don't see my middle sister as much as I should, so we had lunch at Greenhills. It was a busy day, buying the perfect vase and the 2 pots and other efficient shopping errands before walking to lunch and back, and then I remember being really tired. I sometimes get exhausted when I push myself now.

Probably the highlight of the month was going to Brisbane for the sisters 30th. I flew on a Thursday night, she picked me up and showed me her new unit. She went to work leaving me her bus card and instructions on how to get to the city (to see the locations of Harrow! However, she has a north facing balcony and a good collection of books so I stayed home until noon. I didn't take any nice pictures unfortunately. Just this one to show how close the shops and restaurants are.

So I got on a bus to the city and got off just before going over the river where it said Southbank on my phone map, and low and behold I saw a billboard for a Margaret Olly exhibition. The art gallery area is a bit like Canberra though, you are in front of a giant concrete box but where is the door, oh that's the museum not the art gallery, the map says the art gallery is somewhere in this block, Ok just have to walk around the outside until I find a door. I first found the art gallery cafe, where I had a nice sandwich and kept reading the book (an Emily Rodda YA fantasy trilogy), then I spotted the GOMA in the distance.

It was fabulous, there was a Ben Quilty exhibition that I skimmed through and really liked. 

And then I went to the Margaret Olly space, and I was unexpectedly overcome with emotion. I have no idea why, but the sort of reaction I expect to have for Monet and have never had, hit me when I walked in, and eventually I cried a bit. I don't have a particular love of M.O., I just remember her name and art from school. Every exhibition like this makes me want to paint more, that's a part of it. A longing to be like her. I also liked her gloomy cluttery interiors which were somehow bright and alive. Such a contrast to the all pervading scandi style where everything is light and pale. And I could see that she really loved what she painted. She painted her favourite flowers over and over and over. She painted the flowers, and also the wall behind the flowers with her beloved art pieces and nick nacks, and behind that, around the corner, a family member at work on everyday things. Layers of everyday beauty and art and life.

I still really want to paint some walls in my house dark green now. I wish I had high ceilings to make it work.

It was lovely to see Kate! We walked Waffle.

And we had dinner with my aunt and uncle.

This is family cryptic crossword time. I don't get into it myself but I like that others do.

Then we saw Heathers, the musical.

On Saturday, back to the balcony and the reading. Then the 30th in the park by the river!

An excellent game of finska to mix family and work and church friends.

I couldn't get a good photo on my phone, but I love how these fig trees have leaves in big clumps like grapes or wisteria.

On Sunday, we went to Sojurn, Hs church, which was small but great. Would repurchase if I lived in Brisbane. We had lunch at this cafe that does sausages and hash browns, then I flew home.

I've been slowing life down in the mornings and having fancy egg on sourdough type breakfasts with a cup of tea, sitting in the sun and savouring the tea and the sunshine before work.

I'll probably go into it more in August blog, but I have decided not to stress about anything for the rest of the year. "Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God. And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus." I am really practicing this, because I can feel the stress under the surface ready to pour out again when triggered. So I am consciously turning my thoughts away from the things of tomorrow, where pre-planning turns into anxiety, and giving a moment to God in prayer and putting tomorrow back in his hands. Today was a day I did a lot of stressful things (driving to Sydney airport for example) and the week ahead is one that I have been dreading and just want it to be over, but I have been letting go of it. It could be a lovely week! I'm just going to turn up prepared, and see what happens, and enjoy that I am somewhere different.

I was worried I wouldn't have anything to write, so late after July, but its always worth reflecting.