Happy Easter everybody!

I hope you all are having a lovely easter. I have never really felt any fondness for easter - we didn't get chocolate eggs growing up, and we have no traditions associated with it at all. There were none at school either - not even a bunny to colour in, let alone hat parades or egg dyeing or any of the other strange things I see other people do. But a four day long weekend with chocolate?  I have learned to like it.

Not much happened during the week. Baseball presentations are always good for a laugh (translate: boring as batshit) with a wide range of speeches no-one could hear while small children fidgeted and larger children threw dirt at each other. At least it was a beautiful evening.



The landscapers have finished - except for a few follow-up things like topping up the paving sand and getting the electrician to put the lights in - and it all looks fabulous. It'll look even better when we get it planted, and the lawn back to grass from its current dirt and mud. This is the dry creek bed / rock creation with a bridge over it and a bog garden closest to the camera. It is such an improvement!



And a short week meant only two pairs of shoes. I'm keeping the red wedges, they are much more comfortable than they look. A bit frosty on the toes this week! And the turquoise heels had received their marching orders before lunchtime. Nice colour, but not at all comfortable, and that goddam tassel would not stay tied, and threatened to trip me up and hurl me down the stairs. So bye bye homicidal shoes.

Crumbly baskets finished

I've quilted and bound my crumb baskets. It's big stitch with perle cotton in a kind of "liberated baptist's fan". With spiky triangles quilted in the blue border.



I'm fairly sure that wasn't the fabric I had originally intended to use for the binding, but it seems to be OK, and it was on the top of the stack of fabric teetering beside my sewing chair. Too late now if it's wrong!

I've got no idea what to do with the quilt now, onto the pile I suppose.

Lanyon Plant Fair

Just outside the southern border of Canberra is a historic homestead, built in the 1850s and now run as a house and farm museum. I've been a few times, and it's rather lovely - in a classic Australian farm style with wide verandas and high ceilings. The gardens are lovely, with some massive old trees. Every year they have a plant fair with lots of stalls and events, so we wandered down yesterday afternoon.

It was an absolutely perfect early autumn day of sun and clear skies but with just a hint of crisp in the air. Hot enough to make the shady verandas very pleasant, and to realise what a good idea they must have been back in the days before airconditioning. But not the hideous baking heat that must have smothered the place every February for 150 years. 

We had a good poke around all the plant stalls - new plants and different plants and all looking so promising! Before they turn up their toes and die. Before they are left for six weeks by the back door waiting to be planted. Before they go brown and sad.

That won't happen this time, my husband said. Son was up a tree, waiting for it to be over.



So we went around the back and overlooked the mighty Murrimbidgee (that's a river, it's not mighty at all, but trust me, it is in the landscape somewhere) and had a cold drink and a chocolate muffin. I will keep you updated on the progress of the planting ... the landscape guys reckon only another few days, and then we will be able to plant things! And try and remediate the grass, which has taken a terrible beating thanks to the concrete cutter and general dustiness.

Shoe round-up

You'll all be pleased to know I am in a much better frame of mind today. I don't know why - it's another grumpy day of appointments and boringness, with the added pain of a couple of hours of real job work that has to be done - but bad moods do come and go.  Although I think I was in a bad mood that lasted four years when the boys were babies ... not sure. Blocked it out.

This week I entered a sensible and comfortable patch in the shoe racks. Which is good for my feet (and therefore good for my workmates, I like to spread the pain around) but not so good for throwing anything out.

No-one stepped on my blue suede shoes.



Or the pointy (but thankfully low-heeled) witches shoes.

Or the very sensible red Hush Puppies. My god my feet look ENORMOUS in this shot. I do wear a size 10 (8 in the UK I think, 42 European) which is pretty huge. It's about the biggest you can get before you have to go to the speciality shops and hang out with the transvestites. And no disrespect, but trannies' taste in shoes is not necessarily  mine ... although I do have some red velvet numbers still to come.

Tedious

Today was one of those horrible tedious days where you spend the whole time doing time consuming and boring things that no-one will notice and that won't make your life one bit better. Like a boring half hour on the phone to the insurance company to fix a plate glass window that one of the little horrors sent a rock into. Waiting to pick up routine ultrasounds. Waiting in Medicare. Waiting to ask the guy at the petrol station why the pump kept stopping and I couldn't get any petrol into my car ("I don't know. Maybe the pump is low?" I stared at him, he stared back. After a couple of minutes I paid my $3.60 and left.)

A boring half hour in the hairdressers while the boys had haircuts they didn't want and the cutters kept asking me how I wanted it done. Like I would care. Do other mothers care? Am I missing something? A painful twenty minutes on the NRMA online shop trying to spend a free voucher for renewing our membership. Why do they need a log in? I'm trying to spend $100 on shit I don't need, I don't need a password, let alone one with an upper case and a number and four letters that are an acrostic in a non-romance language.

My biscuits didn't work, they crumbled. I have two trays of gingernut crumbs. The best part of an hour filling out school forms because the ACT Department of Education has a new one-page form which you have to fill in for EVERY excursion - name of doctor, name of health fund, known conditions, last tetanus shot, emergency numbers ... to be filled in with exactly the same information a dozen times a year. Are they completely stark staring mad????? An hour with the physio who says my lymphoedema is never going to get better but I"ll be able to manage it. I don't want to MANAGE IT. Old people manage health issues, people in their forties RECOVER.

And the phone just rang. A telemarketer. Poor bastard, I told him to PISS OFF.

Peer pressure

I really did not mean to make this quilt. But, I went to a Canberra Quilter's meeting on Thursday night for the first time in ages. It was the Modern Quilt Group, which is a smaller group of very nice ladies sitting around and sewing. I enjoyed it very much, but they were doing Bonnie Hunter's scrappy trip around the world block. I was quilting the basket crumbs,which was fine, but those scrappy blocks were calling to me…

So I did just a little one, to make me feel better. This could not be called a modern quilt, by any stretch - my fabric choices were non-existent. The central yellows are planned, but other than that it was a matter of which strip came first to hand out of the 2" strip bag. And other than the yellows I didn't use any fabric twice. Which makes it look very traditional and scrappy!!! I will quilt it over the next couple of weeks and then I can take it to the next meeting and sew the binding down, and try to explain how it is modern. Which it isn't. To be honest I'm not entirely sure what modern is, but I don't think it matters.

A quiet week

It's been a slow couple of days here - mainly because I had a mild gastro on Wednesday that left me feeling a bit weak and depleted. Some random bug and not too severe, just enough to make me take some pills and lie down! I thought it might be the dumplings a friend and I stuffed ourselves with at the Shanghai Dumpling Cafe at Tuesday lunch, but that wouldn't kick in Wednesday morning. So we'll call it a virus.

On the weekend I did these bright and lovely beauties. I used all my yellow dye, and I've ordered some more and can't wait for it to arrive. I do love yellow. We have to re-do the upstairs bathroom because the shower tray has rusted through and is leaking a bit - so I'm thinking yellow tiles! My husband draws the line at yellow fittings but I think I can get a daffodil bathroom one way or another. If all else fails I can buy yellow towels. 

The bathroom is a bit disheartening because it's all asbestos sheeting, so it has to be completely gutted with the walls removed by duly accredited guys in hazard suits. Painful and expensive, but no way around it. The bathroom is nearly forty years old, so there is no point in trying to bodgy it up, we just have to take a deep breath and fork over fistfuls of cash. Because it was so manky I was going to give it a quick re-paint to tart it up a bit, but when I started scraping, the plaster came away and some tiles fell off ... with this terrible permeating smell of damp. Can't paint over that.



And on the shoe front, I walked down the street to lunch on Tuesday wearing a very comfortable pair of flats. And do you know, I realised for the first time looking at this photo that these are exactly the same as the cream pair I wore a couple of weeks ago. I've just been to the cupboard and checked the brand and yes, they are the same shoe in different colours. Life is constant learning, isn't it. This is the ugly lino at work; nearly as bad as the carpet.



However Thursday's shoes are off to the donate bag. Those toe-pinching ends are every bit as uncomfortable as they look. The only reason I bought these shoes is because the style is called the .... wait for it ... "Linley"!!! I was in one of those shoe warehouses where they just have boxes stacked up, and the name caught my eye, as you can imagine, and I thought "no matter what is in that box, I am buying those shoes!". And that's how I ended up with a pair of purple suede shoes with gold embroidery.