Drinking myself sober

The name of this quilt is from the Lloyd Cole song I was listening to - and nothing to do with my current consumption of alcohol, which is still zero. I will see how long that will last! I like a glass of wine or two in the evening, but I haven't had any for the last couple of weeks and I do sleep better if I don't drink at all. Mind you I might swear off all beverages after spilling a boiling cup of tea on myself at the work farewell morning tea this morning. I had to race out in the middle of the speeches pulling my clothes away from my body and into the loos to try get running cold water onto my bum. Not elegant at all....



So here is the strangely titled "Drinking myself sober". I saw a picture of a quilt very like this - shoo fly alternating with nine patches in prints and solids - and thought it would do for a quick and satisfying scrap quilt. I have an overflowing tub of strip scraps and this used a lot of the 3 1/2 inch strips. And being such big strips it came together quickly.



No border, just binding, and quilted in general swirls. I didn't have time to pin it to the clothes line this morning for photography so made my husband hold it up while everyone was trying to leave the house. He was very good natured about it.

Other than that we are all very happy to be at Friday - it has been a slightly grumpy parliamentary week and another one to come. My dad arrived yesterday from NZ to stay for a couple of weeks which is lovely, and the Canberra Show is on this weekend. Did my husband win yet another ribbon for his model aircraft? Stay tuned....

Burnt beach

I had a lovely quiet weekend at the beach with lots of sewing, lots of walking, and just the one swim. Saturday was cloudy and cool, and the water was very unattractive - the high tide had left masses of seaweed.

Yuck, I'm not going swimming in that. I know it's just like grass but in the sea but I do not like it flapping suspiciously around my legs. 

There was also a high tide mark of burnt wood and ash. Mostly tiny flakes, some sticks and even some large logs. The beaches all up and down the coast had been closed until Friday because of the fires followed by the severe storms, which washed masses of burnt vegetation into the ocean.



Sunday was a beautiful day though - sunny and clear - and the water was also clear of weed so I went for a lovely swim. Before prising my fingers off the sand and the sewing machine and getting myself back up the hill to Canberra to work for a living. So Unfair.

Sick and it's raining

I had Thursday and Friday off work with some minor bug that just about everyone in the team has had - tired, aches and pains, upset tummy. We are quite sure it's not corona virus because no fever and no cough, but it was still enough to make me sleep for two days and then feel much better. Strangely it has been raining on and off all week. I'm not complaining but we have been without rain for so long that it feels odd to have things damp, and not be able to do washing.

My husband was in Jakarta all week with work and came back Saturday morning - I felt like putting him through a full Silkwood decontamination but he says Indonesia has had hardly any cases. But airports - espeically international airports - are SO filthy ... he said he used hand sanitiser the whole week but I don't know, that doesn't sound very effective to me.

This is what I spent most of the weekend doing; machine quilting a top from solids that I made ages ago. By Sunday I was getting a bit of cabin fever so we took the boys out for lunch. We have scheduled the kitchen renovation, bought the appliances and booked in the floor people so there is a lot of disturbance in our future. It will be great when it's done but I really don't want to have to live through it.

Other than that I am still having an ongoing fight with the car insurance company because they haven't paid us yet and they are so hopeless and you can't get it touch with them EVER, I have decided to give up alcohol for the next few weeks because I feel fat and unhealthy, and I am sad that I couldn't go to the first choir of the year becasue I was unwell. Pam, that is technically a carport because it is open on one side - walls at the front and left hand side, and the big door at the front goes up and down, or it does in theory, we never bother and I think it might be broken. Something else we have failed to maintain. Not having cars undercover in Canberra is a nightmare - six months of the year you can give yourself third degree burns on the door handles, and the other six months of the year you have to spend five minutes scraping an inch of frost off the windscreen before you can see to drive off. Straya.

Another one just like the other one

We did test drive, and check reviews, and look at options ... and then bought another car like the one we have and the one we had before that. A white VW - size small this time. The Golf is a medium really, but the new Polo (on the left) has a one-litre engine, and cannot realistically fit a teenager in the back. Teensy tiny little car.

But honestly we never drive anywhere together as a family - we mostly do city driving - a small car makes a lot of sense. We got a manual becasue we like driving them (and a ONE LITRE ENGINE ffs) and they are cheaper. It is brand new and shiny and clean and smells nice.

I have been so busy at work that my husband did the running around and test driving and negotiating and paying and he did an admirable job - there are not many cars in Canberra at the moment. When we picked it up we ran into friends at the car dealership who had also had their little car written off - they were after one like the one we bought but couldn't get a test drive because we'd nicked off with the last one :) So they came round that night and drove it the long way to the shops for takeaway, which is both an excellent test drive and dinner with friends. Winner.

Ten years of blogging

A couple of weeks ago it was my ten year bloggerversary! Ten years of dumping random shit on the internet with badly lit photos. I am so pleased that I have kept blogging; it has been inconsequential drivel mostly - with occasional forays into middle-aged-grumping, proud-mum-boasting and husband-mocking.

I go back into past posts all the time and look at what I was doing - what the boys were doing - what I was sewing. Am I allowed to say that I am often amazed at all the pretty quilts I've made? Especially the ones with intricate piecing or quilting. Generally I would say that I can't be bothered making tricky quilts,but the evidence is there. More practically, the blog is a tremendous help to keep track of what year we did things, or when we last had the house repainted, or how old the dog is.

Will there be another ten years? Who would know. I am a compulsive writer about myself. This is not an attractive character trait. I kept diaries from the ages of 10 to 16 - wrote letters every couple of days to friends and family when I left home at 17 - then faxes when I moved to Australia at 23 - finally emails at about the age of 30 and now blogs! where I broadcast my daily existence to people who don't even know me. What a wonderful thing technology is.

I genuinely think it is a compulsion, like people who find their happy place in writing fiction, or gardening, or cooking. Blogging is not a chore for me - I will write in my blog before doing other things, because I like it. Even though I write for a living, I am happy to keep doing it in my spare time as long as I'm writing about myself. I can't do fiction, or journalism, I've tried. Like I say, I think this says something disturbing about my psyche. It's all about ME....

Blood and gold

Back in October I was making random flying geese from my solids, and this is what it eventually turned into. Random flying geese! In solids! I think it's called Blood and Gold for more UB40 earworms, but I can't be bothered googling to find out.

 

I am not completely convinced about the quilting, I think something allover that didn't follow the pattern so closely might have been more interesting. But it turned out better in the end than I thought it was going to half way through, so that's something.

To be honest, if you do anything out of solids in a simple block it's going to look good. I took a set of photos with the geese going sideways on a sunny day, and then a set of photos of the geese going up and down, on a cloudy day. I think I like cloudy better.

We have survived the first week back at school and the first parliamentary sitting week. Tired, but hanging in there, and apparently it is meant to rain on the weekend! Can you believe it? Water falling from the sky, incredible. We will wait and see.

Forgot to tell you about the other natural disaster

It's Saturday afternoon and 41 degrees - windy, smoky and very very hot. I am washing basically everything in the house that looks remotely dirty because they are drying in the time it takes me to get the next load done! It's amazing, all the sheets and towels are being whipped through in record time. I'm running the washing machine hose out onto the garden which is the only thing keeping it alive ... or at least some of it is still alive. Much of it has turned up its toes. This is the sun when I walked into work yesterday morning - this is not a good colour for a sun to be.

So the natural disaster I haven't mentioned is last week's hailstorm, which was staggering. I have always heard about the 'golf ball sized' hailstones but never actually seen them before, and christ on a bike I hope to never see them again. I had always thought that it would be like someone standing on your roof and tipping out a bucket of golf balls. It is not. It is like a test cricketer standing on your roof and throwing golf balls as hard as they possibly can at the ground. Those things have TERMINAL VELOCITY. When they hit the ground they are ANGRY.



The storm was a very narrow band that ripped through the centre of Canberra where blameless public servants were innocently going about their working lives. Parliament House copped it - there were knee high drifts of hail and the gardens were completely shredded. Somewhere there is amazing footage of the water features looking like they are boiling. Above is the ledge outside my window - I wanted to go outside to take a picture but I couldn't push the door open because the hail was piled up against it.

It also cut a path through the ANU where my husband works - every single car parked there or around the main government buildings was destroyed. Apparently the ANU carpark was like a bomb had gone off - windows shattered, wing mirrors smashed off, holes punched through skylights and cars filled up with hail from the back or front windows. Our car is an elderly tank so just had the front windscreen shattered but not smashed through, and all the panels were intact. Dented, but intact - the hail was coming in sideways at one point, so every panel got at least one little round ding. (I'd driven the new car so it was parked underground which I am super happy about).



So there were over 11,000 insurance claims made in Canberra, and the earliest insurance assessment we could get was yesterday so went out to a warehouse where they had set up lanes of cars - assessors with mobile phones triaging the cars then a bank of reps of all the insurance companies in a corner just churning them through. It was amazingly efficient - especially with ours because it is completely not worth repairing so they wrote it off on the spot. We left it with another fifty sad cars in the to-be-destroyed corner and they think we should have the money in a few days.



Now to find something else! Funnily enough there are no cars left in Canberra to buy, so I don't know what we are going to do. I'm sure there'll be something somewhere, but it is really not what I feel like doing right now. Our car was old but reliable, so not insured for very much, and we'll never get something for that price that we could trust. Could be worse - the guy in front of us at the insurance assessment had a beautiful new BMW with dints everywhere - they'll probably repair it and it will take months .... at least we should be back on the road in a week or two. Maybe.