Sunday Scribblings "What a difference a day makes"

G'Day,
I am back for a try at the "Sunday scribblings" prompt this week after several weeks absence. Anyway I was thinking of this weeks prompt laying awake last night. What came to mind was loving hands. Don't ask me why, but here goes.

Loving Hands
A day, a year, a decade, a life time.
I have watched your hands.
The nails, the long straight fingers
as expressive as any face,
in anger, sadness or happiness,
in excited speech,
in work, in loving touch.
A touch of love, sensual, gentle
showing their strength.
Holding our new born baby,
guiding a elderly arm,
soothing towards love, or sleep.
Mistakes forgotten to their touch,
their familiar touch
A day, a year, a decade, a life time.
Together.

Oh my children would cringe. Hahaha. Too embarrassing to have parents that still think like that. Yesterday was my birthday. I am now 51. The pic above was taken at my sister's wedding a few weeks ago.

Bye.
Love Linda.

Ellen's Wedding. Burra open gardens.

G'Day again,
I would like this post to be part of the Friday Fertilizer prompt. You can see our host's name on my side bar. There is a Friday Fertilizer logo there. If you click on the picture it will take you to "Tootsie Time's blog and you can see what other gardeners around the world have to share.
Here are some photos from the Burra open gardens which were held on the first weekend in November. I went out there to have a look, as you read in my last entry...OMG.....bloody fantastic gardens displayed at their best. I tried to put in a link to the pics I put up on my face book account but...well you know all about my computer skills, or lack there of, so I am putting them in a separate post to share with you. OK. the first pic is of one of the many photographs I took of the wonderful Iris in flower at a nursery in Burra. All sizes shapes and colors.
Some more of the iris garden beds.
This is at another of the gardens. How would you like to wake up to this view each morning Mmmm mm-mm.Beautiful
An almost black iris. I have a special interest in black flowers.
A delicate pink iris. Iris, iris, and more iris. I did have a few in pots that were flowering but are nearly finished now. Mine were lovely, but the sheer variety and numbers here put them to shame.
Just look at the flowers.
And again, garden beds at the iris farm.
Pure gold.
Here is a red flowering gum at the second garden I visited. Very pretty and very Australian.
And... my theme flower. Waratah. The telopea. Overlooking the Burra landscape. What a view eh. I made this my flower because it is the state flower emblem from where I was born. New South Wales, and I love red. It is not that easy to grow I wondered if the owners had imported soil . The waratah will only grow in sand stone based soil which comes from around Sydney and the coastal areas around there. Certainly not the soil near Burra which is near Canberra. I know the ones growing in the botanic gardens here are in imported soils.
This is part of the second garden on display which is also run as a nursery. I had lunch here and the lady who owns this also blends tea, so it was a great visit for me and I got to sample some of her blends. It was funny trying to get my tiny little car up the steep hill when she stared to slip on the gravel corrugations but I managed it. Imagine what that driveway would have been like in wet weather, definitely an 4x4 needed.
But OH...just look at that view.
A big blood red Shirley poppy.
Another Shirley poppy. I had some of these growing happily in the last rented house we were in and had to leave them behind before I had the pleasure of seeing them in flower Grrrr. Ah well it wasn't meant to be was it.
Part of the first garden. Well is this beautiful or is this beautiful? I visited 4 of the 6 gardens on display before I ran out of time.

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OK the rest of this post shows pics of my sister's wedding that I recently attended in Queensland.
The pic above is of my lovely niece Cassie, with her son Ezra 1 year old, and my son David at my sister's wedding.
The pic above is taken during the ceremony and shows beautiful my niece Tatham, her sister Cassie, my sister Ellen, the bride and my brother in law Sandy. Aren't they all beautiful.
(above) Peter and I at the wedding.
Sandy and Ellen, the Bride and Groom. Wed 31st October 2010.
My mob. David, Me, Michael, Annie and Peter.
A picture of the units we stayed in taken from the beach. Yeppoon, Queensland.
The units we stayed in at Yeppoon. It was really cool to watch the tide go in and out each day and see the subtle changes that happened on the beach.
My baby, Annie my youngest.
My great niece Ivory on the beach at Yeppoon. 4 years old.
This was an anagama kiln at a pottery near Yeppoon that my sister took me to see. It is a dragon with eyes etc to decorate it. Anagama kilns climb up a hill and are fueled by wood, they are a Japanese type kiln and need a couple of days constant stoking with wood and attention for the whole time to fire. Lots of hard work , but the end results are really something wonderful.
Before the wedding. Bride and groom. Hahaha.
Bride's daughter, my pretty niece Cassie, blowing me a kiss. Yes that head dress is just what you think it is. Hahaha.
This is the coal fired power station at Biloela where my sister lives. It is inland from Rockhampton about a 2&1/4 hour drive. The main industry for this area is coal mining and beef cattle. Great steaks, I got to sample them.
I took heaps of pics over the last few weeks in my travels, I hope these few I have shared give you a bit of an idea of what I have been up to.
Cheers.
Love Linda.

G'Day,
Is anybody out there anymore, since I have been away from my blog for so long?
Anyway, for my archives and for anyone who may be interested and still remembers me, here is an update on what I have been up to over the past month.
Well, you know if you have read in here before that I was disgruntled at having to move house. We were kicked out of the house we were living in a few weeks ago at short notice because the owners wanted to move back in. That was o.k. it is their house.
The rental market in Canberra is very competitive and each house we inspected, (and there where many,) was also visited by thirty or more other prospective renters, so as you can imagine it is quite hard and stressful to find another house to rent. We applied for seven places and had confirmation that we were accepted by the present real estate place just 3 days before our cut off date to go to Queensland for my big sister's wedding. As you can imagine it was a mad rush and we were absolutely exhausted. But we did it..... we did it. I can be very determined when I need to be and am capable of pushing myself work wise, to a place beyond where it is physically sensible to go, and I pay the price later.
So the new house? It is a small three bedder and we have had some difficulty finding places for our goods and shackles, we even had to find new homes for some or our furniture. I didn't like that but I guess it was time to do that anyway, and we still have too much stuff, I am bad at throwing things away. The house is ok though. When we moved in it smelt terrible, I guess they let their animals rule the house then tried to cover it up by perfuming it with sweet smelling cleaning chemicals, the blend was unbearable but I think it has improved with cleaning and spraying and bi-carb-soda-ing the carpets. My boss Brett came and sprayed the carpet with industrial deodorizer for me. It is funny how we will tolerate our own foibles house keeping wise, but refuse to tolerate other peoples isn't it. I am not a perfect house keeper but I reckon I am not as bad as some. I have sure seen some doozies in my cleaning work, oh boy have I, and am pleased to brag that my home has never and will never stoop to that standard.
Anyway, we have a house to live in, we had to take what we could get and BONUS! It has a great productive garden. Not too many flowers but lots of fruit trees and a vegetable patch which was very over grown but has great looking soil. Pete has been working on his days off and has weeded and replanted it with an assortment of vegetable seeds and seedlings. Part of the vege patch includes a good size and abundant strawberry patch. The fruit has no comparison to the flavorless berries sold in the supermarkets. It is great and full of juice and flavor. We have been going out the back and eating straight from the garden. There is a fig tree, a nectarine, 2 plums, a peach, 3 espaliered pear tress, 3 cherry trees, a lemon, apricot and loquat, and a large grape arbor. The old man who planted them sold this house 6 months ago and was italian, a race who are known to be great fruit and vegetable gardeners. Mushrooms have also been popping up in the back lawn and we have had several feeds of them.
So....... we went away to my sister's wedding with a house hastily jammed full of unpacked boxes and stuff every where. I had to leave my beloved cat and dog at the kennels and you should have seen their poor faces when I left them, we have never had to leave them in a kennel before, poor things. They have been so neurotic and needy since we came back.
We flew to Brisbane and then on to Rockhampton where we were met by my sister, Mum and my neice Tatham and her new beau, Brennan. We were delayed at Brisbane airport between flights for a couple of extra hours at Brisbane airport, so that was pretty annoying. Then they ferried us in two cars, (there were a few of us) a bit over 2 hours inland to the town where my sister El lives and works, Biloela. I think it has a population of around 4,000, quite a nice friendly little place. El has a house up there rent free and a car rent free with her job. Lucky bugger. It is a large house on a 5 acre block, I think the house we are in here would fit into her lounge and family/bar room easily. Haha. I got a tour of the hospital where she works and had a BBQ lunch with her workmates. They were nice people. Bonus of being the boss's little sister I guess, hahaha. We stayed there for 3 nights then moved to the coast to a town east of Rockhamptom called Yeppoon where the wedding was to be held. The place we stayed was in a great spot, right on the beach. The units were smallish but the owner was great too. It was great to sit under the coconut trees and watch the water gently lapping, the children playing, and the tides go in and out. There were lots of shells and tiny crabs all along the beach and I even got in the water and feel the gently waves rocking my body, then on the way home the taxi driver said a crocodile had been sited in the area a few days earlier....if I had known. Hahahaha. We will definitely have to go back there to explore some of the great barrier reef islands, which we didn't get to look at this time around. North Keppel and Great Keppel islands where right in front of us there.
The wedding was great, and I think everyone enjoyed themselves. There were visitors from all up and down the eastern seaboard of Australia. I put some of the photios in my face book page and I will try to put a link in here so anyone who wants can have a look at them. As I said I will try, ha ha.
So back to Canberra and her pleasures. Yep it is a good place to live. The drought has broken and spring is in all her glory after all the rain we have had, beautiful. It has rained again today on and off, we seem to be getting showers every second day lately.
Last weekend after doing a lot of sorting and organizing trying to get everything in the house organized I went out on Sunday afternoon to an open garden display at Burra. Burra is a semi rural area near here. O.M.G. you should have seen those gardens. Just gorgeous. Emerald green countryside, landscaping and flowers every where. I got to see 4 or the 6 gardens before I ran out of time in the afternoon. I was talking to a lady at one of the gardens and we were saying how do people manage to put all of their time into gardens like that to get them up to such a standard to display. Well two of the gardens were run as a sideline to small businesses run by the owners. One lady and her son ran a nursery and tea blending business, another husband and wife team were iris breeders and there were over 7000 named varieties all in flower at just the right time, so spectacular. At the nursery place I was lucky to negotiate the driveway in my tiny car though, she started slipping on a steep hill and the corrugated dirt gravel road, hahaha. But, when I got up there....oh the views! I had lunch there and spent my money before I got to the iris place so couldn't buy any of the plants there, ah well I have other irises and they are in flower now too, though the rain today is probably finishing them off.
Yesterday I got some extra work at the university where they are renovating a big cafeteria, so lots of scraping cement and climbing up and down ladders and mopping plaster dust off floors, but the extra few hours pay will be nice with Christmas fast approaching.
I went shopping today and bought some cloths for the warm weather, two pairs of trousers and two shirts. Nice.
I have also started a course of treatment on my poor old legs. I have been having acupuncture and acupressure massage. The acupressure massage has been quite painful. They seem to know just where to dig their fingers into your legs to cause the most pain, but it seems to have made a difference already. What I have been blaming on being fat for many years on my lower legs is actually fluid from bad circulation and with the treatment the swelling has started to go down. I am interested to follow through and see what results are accomplished. If it works the way I would like it to I will be able to go on long walks and exercise again the way I would like to do without pain and finish a shift at work without hobbling home and out of the car like a drunken person at the end of the day.
O.k. that's about all for the update for now.
Bye .
Love Linda.

linda may: Sunday Scribblings "Essential"

linda may: Sunday Scribblings "Essential"

Sunday Scribblings "Essential"

G'Day,
Sunday Scribblings asks us to write about what is essential to us today but only write what is essential. Mmmm.OK.

Home
Family
Pete
Home
Michael
David
Annie Brat
Home
Earth
Garden
Soil
Water
Plants
Home
Heat
Cool
Food
Home
Work
Money
Shopping
Nourishment
Home.
Entertainment
Friends
Family
Home.
Essential
Home.
Words
Clay
Fire
Home.
Shelter
Home.

Home. because very shortly I may not have one. We are to vacate this house in a few short weeks and have been trying to find another to rent in a very competitive rental market. Every house we inspect there are three dozen others inspecting and applying for the same property. I am feeling so insecure at the moment not knowing where to go. Bloody Canberra. Bloody real estate agents, bloody home owners. Bloody moving and packing. Bloody Bloody people who don't return phone calls.
I hate this. It never rains but it pours. Grrrrrr! Not impressed.

Friday Fertilizer . Floriade

G'Day,
Hope you all are well. I am o.k. here in Oz. It is Friday Fertilizer time again. Click on the logo in my blogs sidebar and go visiting the other participants of this fun prompt site over at Tootsie Time.
It is Sunday here actually but if I don't tell you I am 2 days late, you can pretend it is still Friday................ can't you?
Floriade festival ended here in Canberra today. This years theme was "Imagine". I was there on Friday (my 3rd visit this year), with my Aunty Joan, and my cousin Joan and it was still lovely, even if many of the flowers were finished, floriade has been running for a month, but there were still lots of beautiful flowers to see. The top picture is taken from the top of the ferris wheel, you can see the patterns in the flower beds if you enlarge the pic.
Pic above was taken from the top of the ferris wheel as well.
Ornamental kale in the kitchen garden beds at floriade.
Here are a few of the named varieties of tulips on display, planted in wheel barrows.
This smaller black tulip reminds me of a black artichoke.
Pretty and delicate tulips.
Big rhododendron in flower in the park at Floriade.
Moi. This was taken at the Australian war memorial on Saturday. I played dress ups. Do I look like I am from the 40's war years?

This is a sleepy bearded dragon. They are quite common, this pic was taken at Floriade in a big glass tank where you could pet them. Beautiful isn't it.
This is in the same tank on display at Floriade. He is a frilled neck lizard. You can't see his frilled neck because they only raise the frill when they want to scare you then they take fright and run. I remember seeing lots of these when I was a child but you don't see them anymore in the wild, or, very rarely.
These are little dragons too, but I don't know what kind. They look very similar to the eastern water dragons in the botanic gardens her so maybe they are the same sort as those. Cute, curious little blokes aren't they.
Here are some nice lace monitors. Also known as goannas. I wish my pics showed their beautiful patterns better in here. As you can see each of the three in this pic have different skin patterns. These guys have scratchy claws and have been known to run to the top of the tallest tree if frightened and if you are the closest tall tree.....hahaha. Funny. They can bite to defend themselves but are not venomous, however as they can sometimes be carrion eaters their mouths have lots of bacteria and can cause nasty infections.
Double tulips and pansys. I thought their petals looked like flames.
Big tulip. This was the size of a dinner plate.
Preeeeeety!
More tulips, aren't they beautiful? And.......the last picture below this one is a bed of lovely iris in bloom. Ahhhh, don't you just adore spring.
My visitors went home just before lunchtime today. I will miss their company. They were a treat to have visit.
O.K.
That's all folks.
Bye.
Love Linda.

Sunday Scribblings "Love & Flashback"

G'Day,
This week I am doing a bit of back tracking. Last weeks Sunday Scribblings prompt was "Love". In have had a read back through last weeks entries and found some really lovely things there. It ties in with this week's Sunday Scribblings prompt for me, which is 'Flashback".
Why, how so?
Well tomorrow Pete and I have been married for 30 years. Cool eh!
30 years in a world of change and break ups in marriages and families. But we are still together. Still together after quite a few rocky bits and sad bits and lots of happy and funny bits.
Makes me wonder how we managed it all these years. But we have and I am optimistic about our future together, yes we still have one. See holding on through the rough bits is worthwhile if there is still love.
I would have liked to have a photo from our wedding to add here but as we are moving house they have been packed away in a box, and I am not dragging them out again. Maybe another post. The photo of us above, is one I have posted before. It was taken about 2, 1/2 months ago on a weekend trip to Sydney.
Flash back?
30 years ago tomorrow.
I woke early, not sleeping much that night due to nerves and excitement and visitors. I really was against the whole wedding show off thing. I just wanted to get married to my Pete without the fanfare. The fanfare was my Mum and sister's idea, not mine. I didn't want the make up and reception and the presents, just Pete. Just Pete. I did want the ceremony and would have liked it to be in a church, but Pete wasn't into that despite being bought up as a catholic. He said, he would have been a hypocrite marrying in the church.
People started arriving, my aunts and cousins, my dear adopted aunt from across the road. The car. I loved that old car. It was a 1940's something black Buick with doors that opened back the front, a real old gangster car. I can't remember the other car but it was a big black american vintage thing too. My uncles provided them and chauffered for us.
I struggled with my make up and poked myself in the eye with the mascara. My sister stepped in and helped and I cringed at the" not me-ness" of it all. Everyone said I looked beautiful but I certainly didn't feel like it. Photos were taken by the old curtains in Mum's living room, ha. Funny how fashions change. Oh well. Stepping ahead.
My dad drove with me in the back of the car and we didn't know what to say to each other. So we said nothing. I don't know what I was expecting but .....something.
We went to the Botanical gardens in Wagga, my park. The park where I played as a child, and walked to as a teen and got married in and picnicked in and had my children's birthday parties and where they played too. We had chosen a spot under a big graceful gum tree in the native area of the gardens. A table was set up and the crowd was gathering. I walked up on my Dad's arm and there was Pete waiting. He looked so nervous and pale.
I took his hand.
I still have his hand,
he still has my heart.
30 years.
And onwards.

Bye.
Love Linda.