Sundays In My City

Hosted by Unknown Mami

Today I was treated to breakfast in bed. I received flowers, tea and chocolates, lots of cuddles, and the mini french press for coffee that I've been coveting for a while. Then I lay in bed with my book, my laptop (so I could write my post for my Mum) and a cup of tea for an utterly indulgent extra couple of hours. I had to get up in the end because the amazing smells that were drifting through the house as Adam cooked up an Anglo-Saxon feast for lunch were making my tummy rumble.

We sat on the front deck for lunch with the sun filtering down through the tree branches and the occasional leaf falling into our plates.

We mostly don't get proper autumn leaves here in Sydney, they just go vaguely yellow-brown and fall off.

Lunch was an Anglo-Saxon feast.

1. Chicken and clam soup, 2. Buttered beets, 3. Honey carrots, 4. Barley, 5. Beef roast, 6. Side dishes, 7. On the plate, 8. Dessert, 9. The chef

Afterwards I took my camera into our front garden to capture the little bits of autumn colour we do get. Our tibouchina trees are in bloom with masses of purple flowers.

Tibouchina flower.

The bees are making the most of the last few grevillea flowers.

I hope all you wonderful mums out there had a fantastic Mother's Day. I've been thinking of those for whom Mother's Day is a difficult time, I hope for you that there was kindness and love in your day from the people around you and possibly chocolate too.

Friday fragments and Linkfest No. 15

Hosted by Mrs4444.

When you get to the bottom of this post don't forget to come back up here and click on this link to Half-Past Kissin' Time so you can go check out all the other fabulous Friday Fragments posts!

I missed fragmenting last week and I've barely blogged at all recently, I ought to have a whole bunch of stuff to offload. Let's see what's lurking in the corners of my brain...

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I spent Saturday night in a small, inadequately air-conditioned room, with a fabulous group of women from the Hoyden About Town blog community, singing loudly and hilariously for 3 hours. Karaoke is so much fun even if it does result in a sore throat the next day. We did everything from Meatloaf and Cold Chisel to Abba and Simon & Garfunkle - there was even a rickrolling courtesy of FP. I'm already looking forward to next time!

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David's first 2 days of high school at the end of last week were a great success, he came home happy and excited, telling us all about his classes. Then on Monday and Tuesday he went to the Year 7 Orientation camp at Vision Valley and came home exhausted and miserable having been separated from his friends both for the activities and for sleeping arrangements, fed pretty crappy food, and generally having a rotten time. What a massive waste of time, effort and money. I had to bully him out of bed and off to school on Wednesday morning, he was in tears and I was so close to giving in and letting him stay home. I had a good cry myself after he'd gone and spent the day in a state of anxiety over whether he was going to have an ok day. Fortunately he came home much happier again, it seems actual classes at high school are a Good Thing. Except for PE - he's not at all pleased that they're doing bush dancing.

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We've been harvesting quite a good crop of tomatoes from Tom's vegetable garden, perfect for slicing nice and thick and having with cheese on Sao biscuits.

Tom's tomatoes

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Things with my Dad have been slowly improving and we're on our way to having the money side of his life sorted out. I'm now managing his finances so if things start to go off the rail again I should know straight away. I feel somewhat weird and conflicted to be in this role especially as when Dad is well he really should be perfectly competent to look after all this stuff himself. I'm going along with him to his next psychiatrist appointment so I can have a chat to his doctor about it too. Dad's still pretty vulnerable but he's a lot better than he was 2 weeks ago and I'm fairly confident that he's not going to end up in a major depression. So that's good.

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I finally got myself a Diva cup after more than a year of intending to do so. It is awesome. That is all. (Actually, I can say plenty more so if anyone has questions - ask away!)

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I finished reading the first Sookie Stackhouse book, I enjoyed it enough that I instantly picked up the second one and started on that. Good thing I bought the box set of 7. The fact that it took me a week to get through the first book says something about my state of mind though, I'm finding I can't concentrate on a book for more than 30 minutes at a time. Stress sucks.

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And now for some links:

At Hoyden About Town Lauredhel posts on the ILCA press release "For Haiti Orphans Wet Nursing Can Save Lives"

At Upside-Down Adoption Atlasien posts about "The Dangerous Desire to Adopt Haitian Babies"

Chally of Zero at the Bone hosts the Thirteenth Carnival of Feminists

I need one of these.

Jill at Feminitse posts about "Tim Tebow and the anti-choice Superbowl ad" and also links to a YouTube ad responding to the Tim Tebow ad featuring Sean James and Al Joyner (none of whom I know anything about but apparently some people are interested in the stuff these people do and say).

Deborah's new car and new hair made me laugh :-)

A room with a view

I was sitting in the office this afternoon, by myself, listening to the sound of the creek at the bottom of the gully coming in through the open balcony door and thinking how lucky I am to be working in such a lovely environment. I've been meaning to take photos for a while now but I always think of it too late and don't have time to muck about with the camera before rushing off to be on time for the kids, but today I wasn't in a huge hurry, so photos there are.

This is the view from our office balcony.

If you click through to the larger image you can see a smattering of white gum-blossom in the tops of some of the trees.

That photo is a little over-exposed because I wanted to capture the greenery up close to our building, here's how the sky really looked today.

Even the car park at work makes me happy as I walk past the gardens full of new growth,

flowers blooming,

and snoozing Banksia men.

There's nothing like a bit of nostalgic reminiscence to brighten the afternoon. My copy of The Complete Adventures of Snugglepot and Cuddlepie was given to me on my 7th birthday by my Nana, my Dad's mum. She always gave me beautiful books as presents, usually purchased at The Children's Bookshop at Beecroft. Snugglepot and Cuddlepie is held together with yellowing sticky tape, testament to many re-reads.

Adrenalin nightcap

Earlier this evening I was suddenly seized with a craving for serious chocolate. I had no luck with my attempt to send Adam on a mission to the Guylian Cafe before he came home so when he got here, after 11pm, I decided to head out to the supermarket myself.

Look, I wouldn't have gone if we hadn't also been in dire need of sandwich meat and fruit so it's not quite as bad as it sounds.

My hunt for serious chocolate was a success, I now have a box of fancy Lindt morsels and they were even on sale. I haven't opened them yet because I had to tell you all this story first.

Are you fascinated so far?

I got home, got out of the car, juggled 2 bags of shopping, 2 Macca's coffees and a Macca's sundae (for Adam), managed to lock the car and then started walking across the footpath towards our garden. I was anticipating the need to dodge the resident bug catcher at the beginning of the path when suddenly my eyes refocused on a point approximately 3 inches from my nose.

A point which was occupied by a dangling, wriggling, eight legged giant which I had come thiiiiis close to walking into nose first in the dark. She was twice the size of the lovely lady I photographed on Tuesday morning and was just starting to build her web. I stopped abruptly, recoiled, swore, did not spill the coffees and then continued on down the front path examining the air in front of my nose at every step.

And now I don't feel even remotely sleepy.

Ye gods am I glad I didn't walk straight into her.

Pretty raindrops (and spider pic)

*Warning - post contains a photo of a fairly large spider*

I almost walked into this going down the front path this morning. It's been there, right on the edge of the path for about a week now, sometimes just a little too far over and whoever is first out the door of a morning cops a face full of web. At least it was easy to see today.

Pretty raindrops.

Here's the owner.

All that nest building paid off

Remember our brush turkey neighbours and the enormous nest mound they built?

It worked. This evening there were three juvenile brush turkeys wandering around in our backyard. They look even less interesting without the bright red heads and brilliant yellow necks of the adults and they really didn't want me getting too close but I managed to grab a few photos.

Lucky

I feel a little less safe from storms after today.

Living, as we do, at the bottom of a gully, sheltered from the worst of the winds in the storms that come through this part of Sydney, I've always felt pretty safe even though we are surrounded by tress that, if they fell, would do some serious damage to the house. Earlier today we had a very brief storm hit, it wasn't particularly windy but there was some fairly heavy rain. And now we have slightly less tree than we used to.

Fallen branches

Two fairly decent sized branches have come down off the Liquid Amber that dominates our front yard. I'm so glad they didn't take out the power and phone cables on the way down, or leave us with a damaged roof or deck.

You can't even tell that the tree is missing anything what with it being so big and leafy.

The only problem is that now my occasional visions of what it would be like if the whole bloody thing came down seem just that little bit more likely.

Kids and animals are a bugger to photograph

I started out this morning with the intent of having a decent photo of each of the kids and pets with which to illustrate the ever so fascinating story of my Sunday. I should know better than to make plans that depend on kids and animals behaving for a camera.

The short version of my day goes like this:

• Get out of bed several hours later than intended (must have needed that sleep-in).
• Flail ineffectually at the chaos in the house (Adam has done wonders with it today as I came and went).
• Take Clara to dog park, forget to take camera (this time she decided to wrestle with a doberman twice her size).
• Bring exhausted but happy dog home and make some lunch.
• Take Caitlin shopping so she can spend her birthday money.

She started out looking at Barbie and Bratz dolls but ended up with a purse and some clothes - my indoctrination program is working.

• Go check on Bren and Di's cats (they're not convinced I'm a safe person, they watch suspiciously from behind furniture).
• Take photos of Clara on front deck (we resort to trickery to get her to look at the camera).

"Dad, why are you putting my squeaky toy on Mum's head?"

• Go to Lowenbrau for dinner (take lots more photos nearly all of which are terrible).

Except these two, which I rather like.

• Come home, get kids ready for bed and read aloud a chapter of The Sword and The Circle by Rosemary Sutcliff (this is hard work, the sentence structure is NOT conducive to reading aloud).
• Decide to blog in preference to writing the speech I have to give about the P&C at the school kindy orientation sessions on Monday and Wednesday.

The cats avoided the camera all day, but here's one of Jack that I took a couple of weeks ago.

"Bugger off, I was sleeping."

Now, to speech writing and ironing! Bleh.

Beautiful plumage!

Our back deck has a number of regular visitors.

There's the rainbow lorikeets who cling to the fly screen and screech at us demanding breakfast.

There's the possum who comes every evening to clean up anything the birds leave behind.

There's the crimson rosella who with great daring braves the wrath of the lorikeets to try for a share of the apples and bird seed (it never works, those lorikeets are fierce!).

And very occasionally we get the King Parrots who are regulars at our neighbour's back deck and rarely grace us with their presence. One of them dropped in yesterday when the kids were doing their homework and for once the camera was in a sensible spot.

We also get plenty of cockatoos - one year we had 2 chicks take up residence in the backyard and persecute the cats. There's nothing funnier than a huge cat being chased by a half-naked bird. A tawny frog-mouth can sometimes be seen perched on the clothesline, Kookaburras hang out in the pine tree in the back corner of the yard, and just a few weeks ago Adam saw a huge owl sitting on the gutter at the front of the house. We even had the brush turkey drop in for a visit, Clara was intrigued but wary, she wouldn't go out into the yard with it there - not that I wanted her to! The door was open and at first I didn't know why she was refusing to go out.

Birds make me happy.

Brush turkey

We've had brush turkeys hanging around near our place for a couple of years now and this year they've chosen to build their nest in the front yard of one of our neighbours.



There's an access path that runs down between their place and the next to the bush reserve behind our houses (we're a couple of houses further down), so there's plenty of material for the birds to work with and the mound is quite an impressive size.

Brush turkey on top of mound



The nest



The rest of the nest



I took a short video too, nothing special but I thought I'd throw it up here anyway.



The turkey scratched its way to the fence and then headed on up and over into the backyard of the next house.



As I was coming back from taking these photos I feel into conversation with the owner of that backyard. Apparently the turkey had been doing some heavy duty work in her yard and had done a great job collecting all the fallen debris from the lawn with the clear intention of adding it to the nest. Of course there was the minor detail of a fence in the way so after all that hard work it'd had to leave the mulch piled up against the fence. My neighbour scooped it all up and chucked it in her green bin (for garden waste), she's quite pleased, it saved her a whole heap of work :)

Walking down my front path

I came home this morning after doing the grocery shopping and as I staggered down the front path loaded with bags of dog food, pasta, snacks for the kids and the like I looked over into my garden and was seized with an urgent need to go get the camera.

Kangaroo paw budding



Tiny and pink



Grevillea



Prostrate grevillea - This does ground cover duty over much of the front yard.



Another grevillea



Tiny and purple



Teeny tiny pink thing - Can you tell I'm completely clueless when it comes to plants?

My garden makes me happy :)