And home again

We were right - the weather in Canberra was horrible (with a tiny bit of snow! such excitement on Facebook!) and the weather at the beach was beautiful. Quite windy the first night we were there, which meant a power outage with trees on the lines, but we played yahtzee by candlelight which the boys didn't mind at all. And the rest of the time was just lovely.  Lots of surfers in the water but way too cold for the rest of us. Number one son made a sandcastle, but that was as beachy as it got.



We went for a walk one afternoon through the state forest to a beach that has no vehicle access - no-one else there as you can imagine, and very pretty indeed. First we walked through the bush for a while.



Then on to the empty beach. It's the right time of year for whale watching but we didn't see any. You really have to pull up a deck chair and some binoculars and sit for half a day watching the sea ... which is a lovely pastime in other circumstances, but I can't see the boys tolerating it for long.



Other than walks we chilled and did very little. We watched series 3 and 4 of Blackadder, and two movies, Interstellar and The Martian. Both very good (and I had number one son to explain the science of both of them, which got me to the edges of my understanding, where we stopped by mutual agreement). One night we had a bonfire and ate enormous marshmallows from Costco. We had them again for morning tea - no fire, but if you microwave them they blow up to the size of a baby's head. Costco=hugeness.



I made another baby quilt top, which I haven't taken a photo of yet, and I'll start quilting it in a week or two. I am working on a quilt for a friend, from some of her late mother's dresses, and I had heaps of false starts trying to find a block and pattern that worked ... and I was psyching myself out because I wanted it to be perfect! But finally I decided just to keep it simple and go with a medallion so I could mix it up a bit to suit the different fabrics; and it has worked out very well and the materials were happy too instead of fighting me, as they sometimes do. So that is first priority for quilting next week.