Sydney

On Saturday my Dad arrived from NZ for a visit, so I drove up to Sydney airport to collect him. Given it's a three hour drive I made it an overnight stay and found a hotel in the middle of town and played tourist for a couple of days.

The weather was glorious and Sydney put on its sparkling best. I haven't wandered round Circular Quay and the Opera House for years and years, and it is lovely. So many tourists from all sorts of places - including some questionable videoing. The influencers certainly weren't there last time I visited.

These giant rocks are an art installation and inflatable! You can walk among them and push them ... it's quite surreal because they definitely look just like rocks. Lots of kids who thought it was hilarious. 

I also did a bit of shopping and went to the Musuem of Contemporary Art. The art was disappointing, half their galleries were between shows and closed, but the cafe was lovely and I could sit and gape at the hugeness of this cruise ship. The bulk is quite astonishing.

And to the Art of Gallery of NSW which was amazing. I like their contemporary Australian collection which always throws up something unusual. 

And most importantly Dad made it on the plane and off the plane and survived the in between bits! And also the drive back to our place, where he is already making free with the secateurs. Wonderful.

Pretty spring things

Here's a better post than garbage - the beautiful spring flowers that we are surrounded with at the moment. I weeded (some of) this garden bed today. It involved crawling around under that blossom tree, which was very pretty and smelled very nice, but also involved lots of bees and showers of petals every time I moved.

The ranunculus that we planted as part of the big bulb order are popping up here and there.

There are heaps of these lovely purple bulbs, I can't remember what they're called.

The ajuga are flowering - I even went and bought some more at the garden centre. It is very odd to buy plants at the garden centre because you get one or two or even ten tiny little plants ... and they just vanish into the expanse of our garden. I am more used to chopping back, ripping out and cutting up than planting teeny little things and cherishing them.

The hellebores are absolutely thriving.

And so much blossom. Beautiful. It rained solidly on the weekend which was wonderful and very much needed. It was the town's arts trail weekend so we went out to a couple of open studios on properties out of town. Incredible art but mostly incredible locations and landscape: one carved out of a big farm right next to the Shoalhaven River with an enormous sky and one in a foggy rainforest valley backing right onto the national park. Even in the terrible weather we're glad we went - a good excuse to explore the neighbourhood.

Piles of shit

There are piles of crap everywhere in the garden and it's driving me mental. I am trying to be relaxed, because they are all absolutely necessary to projects-in-progress, but I don't like it. I sometimes move the piles from place to place, which doesn't really help, but lets the grass recover and reduces the risks of snakes. 

There is a lot of wood that we may well use in the future in projects, and which will be stored neatly in a 'spare wood' place.

The builders leave whatever they are using in one spot.

And pile their rubbish in another.

Anything that needs to be undercover is on the back verandah.

A large pile of crusher dust appeared last week, which I'm sure will be very useful, in a few weeks. I am mentally noting all the spots I will have to re-seed in autumn.

This pile of stones has already been useful, for drainage around the foundations, although it has spread for metres in every direction off its tarp.

And the pile of terracotta pots that I have been using to plant things in but somehow the pile is not getting any smaller. Not shown are the literal piles of shit from the builders' three dogs. We don't mind the dogs, they are all very friendly and lovely, but they do tend to drop a celebratory turd the second they arrive. So that's my rant, I am trying to look at the bits that aren't a mess, and there are lots of very lovely spring scenes at the moment. Which I will post about next time, when I'm more cheerful.

Arty things

I am still enjoying my art classes - and possibly showing some improvement? it is hard to know. The best thing is always Fred the failed service dog. I try to get decent photos but he is always either having a cuddle, or coming in for a cudddle, or cruising for a cuddle. Such a good boy.

I am still trying to do people. People are really hard, especially if you want them to look like themselves. This painting is fine, but it doesn't look anything like the photo I used as a reference ... which is why I'm not going to show it to you. We will call this Imaginary Man.

I didn't know what to do one lesson so the teacher suggested dancers, for movement. So I just did dancers! How much fun ... some are good, most are terrible, but it was interesting to do. So many options in how you put their limbs, and very hard to show where those limbs are, especially in monotone.

In paint-related news, this is the colour the consultant suggested we paint the house. I had sent through photos, including the studio, and she suggested we choose a colour related to the studio but much less saturated and much cooler. 

It looks very yellow in this photo - especially against the white undercoat -  but in some lights it looks cream, and in other lights almost green. She also suggested one of the million whites for the frames, and a nice grey for the fascias ... and a bright red for the front door. The red does look fabulous but I'm not sure if it's what I want to do. Given that we might have to paint the house ourselves for poverty reasons, there is absolutely no rush to make any decisions.

Christmas explosion

My quilt group is having a sale table at the exhibition in November - and we decided to sell christmas table runners. I'm not 100% sure why, but we have lots of christmas fabric and patchwork table runners are nice to look at and (comparatively) easy to do.  We had friends stay on Tuesday night on their way from Brisbane to Melbourne - a three day drive, we were the second night - which was lovely. They arrived about 7 pm so we met them at the pub and were able to get a seat by the fire - the cold change had come through and Queenslanders are very soft :) Then I went down the coast again on Wednesday to get away from the builders and make some table runners.

I had a three-day sewing fiesta. Made a big mess, didn't cook much, went for some walks and made four table runners which is probably enough. 

I still have to sew the binding down on this one. Nothing fancy but satisfying to do.

They all look quite old-fashioned, I'm not sure why. I picked fabrics from the shed and I might have gone a bit more traditional than usual. 

The beach was beautiful as usual. Wednesday it rained for hours, which was much needed. It is scary dry down there at the moment and hopefully a day's rain has helped with the upcoming summer. 

Thursday and Friday were much hotter and I went for some lovely walks. I could perhaps have gone swimming but it was a bit windy. 

Grand plans

Even though we have fifty million unfinished things on the go at the moment, we can't help thinking about more grand plans. One of the unfinished things is dealing with that enormous dead pine and the ridiculously huge mountain of crap wood it created. We don't want to hire a log splitter so we needed a way of dealing with the rounds that are too big to split by hand. 

I rolled eight of the roundest to the front under the north pines to be seats at our future fire pit! It is a nice slope, reasonably near the house for winter sojourns but not too near (for fire reasons) and far enough away from the pines to be safe. I have watched several youtube videos on how to build a fire pit from old bricks (we have old bricks) and I am quite confident in my abilities to do this, even though it will probably not work out at all. But there you go - fire pit. I will also make cushions, for the pine tree logs. 

There are eight of them because I had seven originally and it made me really uncomfortable. I wouldn't say I am even a tiny bit superstitious but I felt like arranging seven old pine stumps in a ring in the garden was asking for trouble? Is that weird? I had to go get another one.

And this is for the not-so-round pieces - my cyclamen garden-to-be. Nothing grows under these pines - including grass - so I'm arranging the pine logs close but not touching; in autumn I will fill the gaps between them with compost or soil and plant some cyclamen corms. According to the internet it should work, and I do like cyclamens. Grand plans.

I also planted the remaining few snow in summer in a bed by the verandah. Under the little-known caulking gun bush. Sigh.

Precision carpentry

The hammering, drilling and sawing is not making life pleasant, but it is resulting in some improvements around the house. This wall is now watertight, with a new window frame (not rotting) and a nice undercoat of waterproof paint.

This is all new weatherboards - the old stuff was not salvageable - with a new window frame and a repaired window that actually opens! Very exciting, we haven't had opening windows in the kitchen so this is definitely a step up. The guttering is yet to come, but there's new flashing (possibly? maybe something else?) and general useful things. It is all costing a ridiculous amount of money and taking an unfeasibly long time but we have nothing but time, and who needs overseas holidays anyway. Not me.

Next we have non-precision carpentry paintstakingly put together by me and my husband (mostly him, but I helped) using whatever we had. This is offcuts from the studio.

Cold frames! For the next stage after our little seed starter trays (my marigolds have sprouted, it's very exciting). Random wood, laserlite roof, hinges and a rope handle. Opening and closing, it's amazing and we are very pleased with ourselves. Surprising what screws and bolts and things you have laying about when you look.

They are only meant to be temporary while we sort out what kind of greenhouse / shadehouse arrangement we want permanently. You can't rush these kind of decisions (and we have no money, see above).