The dangers in gardening; Part 2..

The new leaves are starting to appear on the crepe myrtle trees; to the left of the photo are the shrubs which I'm slowly working on to prune back old growth.

It's Spring here in my part of the world and there's lots to be done in the garden. This is especially so for me as in recent years many of the heavier garden jobs were left undone...especially pruning of shrubs and small trees. As a result these plants have become rather rampant here at the Goodwins.

Splashes of mauve colour on the jacaranda tree

The clivia didn't flower last year but is making up for it this year :-)

The first of the hippeastrums (amarylis) to flower this year

A climbing geranium cutting I brought back from a visit to Warwick a few months back is now flowering

Lettuces thriving in the veggie patch



 Just over a week ago I wrote of the shoulder and arm pain that I was experiencing after a particularly enthusiastic pruning session. By last week that was all better so I re-started the serious pruning that needed to be done. I couldn't find what I'd done with the safety goggles. After looking in a few places I thought I'd just do a bit of pruning and I would be very careful. Yep! You guessed it! A wayward branch of a plumbago shrub poked me in the eye when I wasn't looking. After a bit of discomfort I decided to go to the GP and have the eye checked out. Getting the appointment was no problem but getting in to see the doctor at the appointed time became quite problematic. I waited an hour and a quarter after my appointment time :-). Then a few drops of orange dye in the affected eye, a check with the little ultra violet light and the doctor announced that there was no damage to the cornea, so all was good. It got even better when I went to pay the bill. The girl waved me away saying I was 'right to go'....I'd been bulk billed! Yippee free!!

Another part of the 'jungle'! Note the black and white 'tiger' lurking!

By the way I later found the goggles just inside the back door on the floor; not in the gardening cupboard in the laundry!

 Just a reminder of the Pay It Forward Giveaway which closes 7pm Eastern Standard Time Thursday which is about 21 hours away. It doesn't matter where you live, if you are a blogger entry is just by leaving a comment here.

Still looking back...this time 27 years ago...

On Sunday I wrote about what I was doing 30 years ago. Now I'll tell you about what I was doing 27 years ago on this night. It was DD1's 3rd birthday of course. Mmmm now I can imagine you're thinking...so?  All will be revealed...

We decided that we would just have a small family dinner for E's birthday with just mum and dad, grandma and her god-parents Pamela and Garry. I had 3 more weeks to go till the due date for my second child so was starting to get tired easily. DD1 and I had made some little party hats for the guests and 'Aunty' Pam had made the birthday cake. Little miss went off to bed about 8 and by 10.30 my husband and I were loading the dishwasher and tidying up. I got to bed by 11pm and promptly fell asleep.

A rare photo showing my 'baby bump'; DD1's 3rd birthday

A sharp pain woke me at 1.30am. I sat up and then realised that my 'waters had broken'...oops!! Things were happening obviously. I woke my husband and then went downstairs to my mother's granny flat to first of all tell her what was happening and secondly to borrow a pair of slippers as I still hadn't bought a pair to go in my 'hospital bag'.
We arrived at the hospital by 2am and I sat in a little office giving my details to a midwife; everything was calm and unhurried. Then she said that perhaps she'd better examine me. When she did she said that I was 8cm dilated...hmm I'd read somewhere that that meant I was in stage 2 labour. All of a sudden things weren't calm any more. Normally in those days when you came into hospital, you had to have an enema (yuck) and a shower and change into their gowns...no time for any of that, they rushed me to a delivery suite.

Then there was a problem...my doctor had slipped away for a week's holiday with his family as no births had been imminent amongst his patients.  That's no problem though...the hospital rang his locum, a specialist. But Dr Lee was also on holidays. So his locum (another specialist) came all the way from Wynumn in the early hours of the morning to deliver the baby of a woman he'd never met before. Dr Smith arrived at 3am. Little Miss DD2 came into the world at 3.20 am Thursday 20/09. She was small...only 6lb 8oz but nevertheless healthy. And it was a very easy birth.

Next day when the family came to visit, Miss 3 suddenly looked so grown up! She proudly told anyone and everyone, ' I've got a new little sitzer; her name is Demphaner (Jennifer)', eventually the baby became known as 'Demphy'.

So my girls have their birthdays a day apart; not how it was meant to be at all!

Pay It Forward Giveaway...

In the 1990's I spent a lot of time at university which meant lots of assignments and tutorial presentations to prepare. A lecturer in the QUT School of Early Childhood /Faculty of Education gave me some great advice on how to survive working , raising a family and surviving uni when doing more than one subject per semester. It was simple...organise yourself so that one lot of  research will give you enough material for 2 different subjects' assignments. It doesn't always work but the inter-relatedness of so many topics did save me a lot of time and effort.  I've always enjoyed books and films that that have characters and or plots that are all intertwined and inter-related. (I loved 'Marchlands' which was shown on ABC1 recently because of that very thing!)

So I've been absolutely chuffed about the link between the 2 books I've been reading. Please excuse how this photo is turned...'blogger' is playing silly games at the moment, with me any way! lol It was great to be reading both as the same theme ran through them.

I've mentioned both in previous posts. Shannon Hayes book contains a lot of research on the process by which societies changed from family units being production units to consumer units in society. The book also contains personal stories of Americans who have chosen to be more in control of providing for their family's needs.  The other book 'The Undomesticated Goddess' by Sophie Kinsella is the PIF giveaway which I won on Fee's blog. It was a bright and breezy and enjoyable read, although I did cringe at some of Samantha's early culinary disasters. Now it's time for me to send this PIF on to the next person. There are some conditions attached to being part of the PIF. Click on the scanned image below to enlarge the image and then  read those conditions. Still interested??

 Now if you are a fellow blogger and would like to have a chance to 'win' this giveaway, just leave a comment at the end of the post saying that you would . If you don't live in Australia it's still ok to be part of the draw.
On Thursday 7pm EST, I'll draw out a winner! Is this book coming to your place???

On this day 30 years ago...

Thirty years ago was a Friday. My first baby was due on the following Monday. All day that Friday I had the compulsion to clean and I did. The vacuum cleaner didn't seem to be working very well, so I convinced my husband that we should go into the city for late night shopping and buy a vacuum cleaner, which we did! (now how mad/idiotic is that?) We lived only 5km from the city and in those days it was easy to find car parking there...but it's still idiotic lol!

We came home with a brand new cleaner, a Hoover I think, and then I made us dinner. And I remember what I cooked, Steak Diane and a tossed salad. After dinner I went to bed, leaving the washing up, as I was quite tired by then. I woke up at about 5 am with abdominal pains, so off to the loo I went. These pains kept coming back and then I decided to see what the time interval was. Hmmm every five minutes..could it be...could I be...???? Husband rang the GP who said that I should go to hospital. I was there and admitted by 7am and at 10 to 1 in the afternoon, DD1 was born.

This photo has become a family favourite; at first I didn't have the knack of folding the nappy so it was small. That means the nappy came to her knee. The little booties were knitted by the grandma of one of my students.

Last night DD1 celebrated her 30th with friends. I've seen the photos on FaceBook and it looks like a wild time was had by all!! lol

UFOs and FNSI...

Years ago my best friend worked for the Australian army  (6th brigade) as the Brigadier's secretary and she would drive me nuts when she 'spoke' in initials and acronyms but eventually even in my job we 'spoke' that way too, as in NAPLAN, QCAT, ACARA...but I digress...

Last night I joined in at Heidi's blog here for the monthly Friday Night Sew In (FNSI). I sewed, but my project was not with fabrics and cottons. I sewed the borders on an unfinished object (UFO) which had been languishing in my knitting bag for a while...oh all right...I confess...it's been lying idle and unfinished for a long time! Now why do some items become UFOs and not others? Not all UFOs are created equal for that matter. Sometimes it's boredom, sometimes something doesn't turn out as expected and there is no real joy at the thought of finishing it.
My UFO was a baby blanket for my daughter's god-daughter. DH remembers us driving up to Warwick for her baptism 9 years ago. The first stumbling block with it was that because I didn't do a tension swatch first, it became obvious that the blanket would be a bit wider than it needed to be. I solved that and saved myself lots of extra knitting, by turning the blankie so that the width became the length. Then I knitted the boring garter stitch borders to match the garter stitch 2rows which occur every six rows on the pattern. Occasionally my daughter would enquire about the baby blankie and I would assure her it would soon be completed but was still a Work in Progress (WIP). She's also still waiting for a knitted throw for her as the one she has already, was knitted by me for her when she was in her early teens. About 2 years ago I said that when I finished this baby rug, I would give it to her and she could give it to whom ever she chose.



Now that I'm retired...I thought I should make some sort of effort to finish this UFO and about 6 weeks ago decided I would finish it and take it for 'Show and Tell' to 'Sisters of Stitch' on the following Wednesday. I finished weaving in some loose ends and started sewing on one border. I divided the border into 4 and then the same with the side on the blanket. Tacked the border at these points and then started to sew the border on. I was just about finished one side when I realised there was some puckering...I started to unpick a few inches carefully to re-stitch and then a minor disaster occurred. I nicked some stitches...luckily this damage was done to the knitted border not the body of the blanket...that would have been a major disaster! lol



'Bubble' pattern 

 I couldn't mend the nick to my satisfaction so I started to unpick all the border. Let's just say that I had sewn it so that it wouldn't come apart...I won't go into details but suffice to say I ended up using scissors and ended up with lots of 'frogged' yarn. Then I calmly folded it all up and threw it in the knitting bag...until Tuesday this week. I knitted a new border and sewed it on last night... Joy of joys! It's all finished!! Hallelujah!!

The cat's birthday...

By 2004, DH and I had quite a menagerie; all animals that needed a home for various reasons. We had Ozzie, the dog and the cats, Merlin, Paolina (Lina) and Eduardo. Now we have just Eduardo or Eduardo Phillipe to give him his full name. Today is Eddie's 10th birthday...so what is his story?

In 2001, DD2 and I were living in a little rented house. In September 2000 I had searched for a rental property that would allow us to have pets. We'd been forced to leave our 2 tabbies behind and I had hoped to reclaim them when we found suitable accomodation. 'Nice' places usually don't allow pets so we ended up renting a more rundown property which was freshly painted inside and had excellent security...so not so bad after all. Then DD2's father decided not to let us take the cats. We missed not having a pet!
In September 2001, at a suggestion from a workmate, I 'adopted' a mature cat called Angus from the 'Paddington Cat Practice'...in other words a rescue cat. He settled in well but then a few days before Christmas that year, I found him dying under the mango tree in the backyard. I bundled him up and raced to the vet but he died in the car. The vet suspected poisoning which is a terrible thought.

In late January 2002, DD1 rang to say that she had seen a cat who looked like a beloved cat we used to own, Holly who was tortoiseshell and white. It was in a nearby pet shop. DD2 and I went to meet DD1 at the shop and have a look at the kitten. I would have bought her in a flash but this kitten was for DD2 to replace Angus and she didn't want the little female.

DD1, aged 2, with our beloved Holly

She said she didn't want a cat but if she did, she wanted ...'the ugly one'! We went and did some grocery shopping and then went back to buy the 'ugly one'. (he wasn't and isn't ugly!!!) At the time DD2 was going out with a Colombian boy and was in what I call her 'Spanish phase' so that's how he ended up with the name, Eduardo Phillipe.

Late 2002 we all moved into where I live now as we were housesitting while the future DH completed a 3 month tour of duty in PNG with Ausaid. Then in September 2003, DD2 married and moved into accomodation where pets were not allowed. So DH and I have cared for him and now he's the only one. He's a very vocal cat...quite a strident meeow in fact! I love the way he 'chats' to me and also the way he runs to meet the car when it pulls up. Happy birthday Eddie, we hope you have lots more. (recently Eddie needed vet treatment; the vet described him as elderly...no way!)

When DH is away, Eddie can be naughty; here he jumped up on the table to get a scratch behind the ears .

Junk mail and consumerism...

Junk mail from letterbox on Sunday

Junk mail from letterbox on Monday

Here in Australia we celebrate Fathers' Day in early September. I thought that after FD, the quantity of junk mail should lessen for a short time before the 'onslaught' on the build up to Christmas. Well silly me!!! As you can see from the photos...there's no let up in the pile of leaflets and sales brochures and catalogues in the letterbox. On closer examination I noticed that the supermarket chains are urging people to buy snack foods and soft drinks for when people gather in front of TVs to watch the semis and grand finals of the various codes of football. Not to be outdone, the electrical stores are urging people to buy wide screen Tvs and various other electronic gadgetry on which to watch these games. But the electrical stores are focussing on consumers who will watch all the games in the Rugby World Cup which is naturally a separate competition from all the Australian (and some NZ) finals and I guess a heap more games to watch!

This is where my junk mail ends up...

I love the cover of this book by Shannon Hayes!

This week this book became available from the council library. I first heard about it on someone's blog and when I found it in the library catalogue, put a 'hold' on it. I can't remember whose blog I was reading but the blogger was enthusiastic about this work by Shannon Hayes. The message that I've got so far in my reading is that people have become viewed as consumers (hence all that marketing through my letterbox) instead of being seen as producers. Many of the blogs I follow are written by people who are rejecting this consumerism and are growing food themselves, some are raising animals such as hens and many are cooking from scratch, preserving food themselves and turning their back on mass produced, preservative laden  pre-prepared foods. from my little corner of the world, I've started a similar journey and in particular I'm concerned with how in the 'western world' we waste resources especially with the built-in obsolesence factors with electrical appliances. I now find myself questioning 'how and where was this item made' and the obvious...'Do I really need this?'