angharad_gam

I can see I may be falling into a pattern of only posting here when I am sick or bored or both. But life has been fairly quiet recently. Work has been keeping me moderately busy, with a trip to Canberra and sporadic filling in for my boss. Otherwise we are on the run down to the end of the year, and starting to think seriously about what we are doing for Christmas (which will be at our place this year - definitely no last minute rushings off *crosses fingers*). Maybe I will try and get in a food post about our plans between now and then. 

But, yes, I am sick. Liam had a bit of a cough at the end of last week, and I started feeling a bit tickly in the chest on Sunday. By Sunday evening I  had a raging sore throat and had almost completely lost my voice, which persisted through most of Monday. Ashwyn was highly delighted to discover that I couldn't speak when it came time to try and tell him he needed to go to bed. 'You sound terrible, Mum,' he said. 'Maybe you shouldn't try and talk.' Getting laryngitis when I have a cold is not terribly unusual for me, but having it persist for more than a few hours is. Anyway, fortunately that has mostly settled down, but I am back to coughing quite a lot, and poor Andy is sleeping on the couch so I don't keep him awake at night. 

Aside from this, I finished my completionist, imported world-state playthrough of Dragon Age: Inquisition, which ended up being about 125 hours long (I had skipped some of the DLC on my first play through, and skimmed over some parts of the game). I am still completely wrapped up in this game, and I am hanging out for the next one now. That there will even be a next one is still an unconfirmed rumour, and it is unlikely to appear before the end of next year, if then. I am glad I didn't get into this series in 2014 when DA:I originally came out!  Andy has convinced me to give the original Mass Effect trilogy another go. You may recall I had trouble getting into this when it was first released, but I found it a lot easier this time round and finished the first game yesterday (it wasn't a huge game). 

Stuff I have been reading lately: Provenance by Ann Leckie (set in the same universe as her Raadch books, but not about them - I liked this a lot), The Southern Reach trilogy by Jeff Vandemeer (I only just started the second book of this - it is very weird and somewhat unsettling. Andy liked it a lot, but I am still waiting for it to grab me by the throat). Also, I thought I would try the Lord Peter Wimsey books by Dorothy Sayers, as I have been on a bit of detective fiction kick for a little while now. I have to say that as far as 1920's detectives go, I prefer Phryne Fisher, but then she has the benefit of being written by a modern author for modern readers, while the Lord Peter books are nearly 100 years old now.

The Spring glories of the garden have passed on, and it's starting to get into the kind of weather where it is too hot for gardening, but that matters less because it is also too hot for weeds to grow. 

Erin is in the middle of exams. This is the first major exam period of her schooling (they seem less keen on them than when I was in high school), and she is stressing out a bit. After that she will be done with school for the year, and then she only has one year left (I swear five minutes ago she was a baby). Liam has now just slightly edged me out in height, and given that Ashwyn is already up to my nose I am still betting on my proposition that I will be the shortest in the house by the time he is 12. I am already the person with the smallest feet. 

 Experimenting with getting images in here. The process is a trifle cumbersome. I need to move the picture from my SD card to my phone memory, then upload to DW, then copy URL in here. All a bit tedious on a touch screen.

Hopefully, here is some proof that the garden, at least, thinks it is Spring:
( Read more... )Hmm... That was distinctly painful.

A couple of years ago, when we first put in the vegie beds out the back, I planted some lettuce seed. The lettuces germinated, but that was a very cold, damp winter, and the back garden is rather sheltered, so they never really grew beyond seedling size. Then when summer came along they died. Every year since then, around this time of year, lettuces seedlings have sprouted in the same spot, with the same result. This puzzles me somewhat. No lettuce has ever grown enough to bolt to seed, and lettuce seed is not especially large or robust (ie I cannot imagine that the original seed is still surviving in the ground). I can only assume that some kind of root structure is surviving and regrowing leaves every winter. Anyway, given the relatively warm and sunny weather we have had through most of June, it seems like we might get some actual lettuces out of them this time round. This is assuming the Thing doesn't find them first.

In other news, I looked at my hands yesterday and thought 'hey, for once all my nails are nearly the same length' (presumably because I have been too sick to do much gardening lately). I then proceeded to break three in the course of the next 12 hours...

So, a bit of catching up to do.

The first half of the year was totally mad, but seemed to crawl past, and now I am sitting here with only three weeks left in the working year and I feel somewhat as if I have whiplash. Clearly I need more stuff in my life to slow it down.

Or possibly not.

Certainly Spring seems to have lasted all of about five minutes, and the garden is reflecting that. The heartsease and poppies are gone now, alas, but in their place we have gladioli and cornflowers:

 

I don’t have a photo, but we have a moderately successful experiment with herbs and tomatoes in a plot out the back. The new (not so new anymore) house has a largish courtyard which is completely covered by a pergola, part of which is clear perspex. There is a garden bed under this part with the clear roof (which was a later addition to the house, I gather), and when we moved in it was empty. I tried planting some herbs in there but they mostly died over the winter. All but the parsley. I theorised that over winter the sun wasn’t strong enough to get through the roof, so when Spring came I planted some more things out there – more herbs and some tomatoes. I wasn’t at all confident anything would take, because not only was there the issue of the sun, but also that patch doesn’t get any rain. This means it only gets water when we water it, and since there wasn’t much growing there, we weren’t watering it much. The soil was in pretty poor condition. However, with a couple of sacks of potting mix, some fertiliser and water, we now have tomatoes. They aren’t as spectacularly flourishing as the ones we grew in the ‘tent’ last year, but given I wasn’t expecting much I am quite pleased.

Last time I posted about something that wasn’t Gran I mentioned the inkle loom that irreparablegave me. I’ve been tinkering with it a bit. Here was my first go:

This is quite a narrow braid, not much more than a cm wide.

I was a bit puzzled by the threading of this loom, as it is a slightly different set up from other inkle looms. I googled the name Penelope and found only one other useful reference online to Penelope inkle looms – from someone else in Adelaide. Apparently these looms were once used in schools here for kiddies to do crafts on, so they must be quite Adelaide specific. Anyway, in case anyone else is looking for info on these looms, here is the warping set up:

I thought this was kind of nifty, so I decided to have another go, this time making a wider braid:

A closer view:

The next few weeks, then.

On Friday I will be having a significant birthday ending in a 0. I think Andy has plans, but since I quite like surprises I haven’t been probing too much as to what they are. However, I am planning on taking the day off and thoroughly enjoying it.

Thursday and Friday of the following week I shall be in Canberra.

And then on the 14th of December we shall be piling all our kids onto a plane (and oh boy is that going to be fun) and heading to Queensland for more or less the rest of the year (we’ll be back just before the New Year).

And that’ll be it for 2014. What a year.

I haven’t posted for ages, I know. I started writing a long catch up post a few weeks ago and literally in the middle of writing I came down with a horrible lurgy that kept me off work and not particularly feeling like sitting in front of a computer for a whole week. Andy had the same thing at the same time, which always sucks. Anyway, the lovely weather last weekend and a few people posting garden pics on G+ inspired me to get out and take some pictures of my springtime garden.

Not much to say besides that. I am mostly over the lurgy now. Work is much much less stressful than it was in the first half of the year. The ankle is still giving me grief, which is annoying. Andy had a lovely Father’s Day. I appear to have given up on EOS and gone back to playing Skyrim. The rest of this month is looking pretty quiet, but October is promising to be busier (Week off for school holidays, week in Canberra for a management course, and trying to get to an event (or maybe even two)).

Enough said! On with the springtime delights!
( Read more... )

I've always been susceptible to superstitions. I know not why, except to suppose that I am an especially credulous person. One that's stuck with me for a while I picked up from one of the Moomintroll books, that I first read when I was about six or seven. It goes like this: if the first butterfly of summer that you see is white or yellow then that is good luck, and you are in for a lovely summer. If the butterfly is brown or black then that is terrible luck.

I've often wondered at the logic of this, from a gardener's perspective. After all, there's a reason they call them 'Cabbage Whites'. But I was reminded of it recently when I saw my first butterfly of this spring and it was black and orange. So I looked it up (well, I googled it). And while there are a couple of 'see this colour butterfly, expect good weather' superstitions there's nothing I could find that more precisely matched the Moomintroll superstition. Curse you, Tove Jannson, you have misled me for thirty years!

I thought a few weeks ago that we were likely in for an early Spring. Those few sunny days we had I managed to get out and do some gardening and it seemed like everything was on the verge of flowering. I got back out to do some more gardening this weekend, and it's full on Spring out there. The plum and cherry trees are in blossom, the daffodils are just about over already, and even the grape vine is starting to show spots of green. And it's not even 24 hrs into September...

I guess I'll be going out to get some antihistamines.