Thursday, August 27, 2009

Happy (poetry) days


My friend Angela is having a very happy time having won an Arts Council grant that sent her on a 6-week stay in a cottage somewhere in Ireland to write poetry! I've been following her blog - http://light-trap.blogspot.com/ which is full of misty photos of Irish scenery and happy poetry readings both in Ireland and London ...

She's not actually coming back to Australia (and work) till next January - lucky thing!!

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Breaking the silence

Don't know why I haven't been posting - nearly a month now since I last posted. Life is carrying along happily, and pretty mundanely to be honest! No big exciting things happening ... :) I did have a very nice yoga class on the weekend, and feel pretty good about that side of things. Work is going well - though I'll be really glad when it gets to be light at the time I have to get up (5.30am). Did some gardening on the weekend - planted some tomatoes and another strawberry plant. And other veggies planted are doing well.

I've got a couple of garden 'projects' that I'm hoping to finish, or at the very least get underway before Christmas. One is to mosaic an old round cement slab that's sitting in my front garden. It's about 1.2m in diameter. I know I need to do it before summer gets to its height (January/February) as it'll be too hot to work outside then. I went to the library on the weekend and got some mosaic books out, looking for a design/ideas. Then I can work out how much I need in the way of different coloured tiles etc, and start to collect them.

My other project is the swimming pool. My swimming pool is an above-ground one, that is decked in around most sides, and only accessible via the house verandah. A few months ago it started leaking a bit (again!) and the people who look after it told me that the tree roots that have been trying to get in from underneath are too much of a problem and I needed to replace it (and remove the tree-roots). About $1000. Then it turned out that I'd have to replace the supports as they were rusting away ($$$), and the pump no longer works properly, and ($$$$$) ... So I decided the swimming pool had had its day; stopped paying the pool guys to come and clean it every month and just left it (covered).

I had the idea to convert it to a garden pond, but it seemed like it might be too much work. And then someone else said to me that she'd deck it all over (having removed the pool itself plus water) and have a large entertaining area there. Now that seems like a good idea, at least for when I sell the place (which I will do eventually). But right now I'm saving to go on an overseas trip next year and I don't want to spend money on something like this. So, after consultations with another friend, for now I'm going to encourage frogs etc. into the pool, get a few low-maintenance water plants into it and see what happens!

I find it's good to put a kind of deadline on things - gives me something to aim for. I don't know how far I'll get along with these projects, but I'm pretty sure that if I didn't say to myself - do this by Christmas when you (I) will have family and visitors around, it's quite possible nothing would happen!

Hmm - seems like I did have a few things to write about after all !

 

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