Friday On My Mind

We're actually going out for dinner tonight with my cousin and her lovely partner Mai.  It's been a social kind of month so far and likely to get to be more so.  I'm loving being able to do it after a decade in the social wasteland of Lyme disease! 

Last week I met with three of my best friends.  We haven't been all together at once for two years, but you know how it is, it is like only a day has passed.  We forgot to get a photo this year, because we were too busy talking and laughing all evening, but this was taken when last we were together.  Love you, gorgeous ladies!  Had a sore throat the next day from talking so much!

 
Summer is a-coming in here.  The lemon-scented gum outside mum's house has recently shed all its old bark and the new skin is so beautiful, slowly turning from green to pink and then creamy-white.

A week or two back, Andrew peeled a straggler bit of bark off, not knowing it hid a secret and that he'd accidentally pulled away this Hunstsman spider lady's egg sac.  We carefully laid the bit of bark, with egg sac, on the ground beside the tree and crossed our fingers, and yesterday I found that she has carried it back up the tree and patched up her spot as well as she can without her bark shelter. Can you see her under her web protection there?  Maybe you don't want to!  :)

Mum has a bit of a love/hate thing going with this tree.  It is HUGE, and getting bigger by the year, and it is really too close to her house to be so big.  She remembers when she first planted it and was so worried when something ate the baby leaves, and now she wished it had eaten the whole tree!  It is hard to get a scale of it, but can you see the tiny bit of horizontal light on the bottom right of that picture?  That is the top of mum's front verandah.  Yep, the tree is that big.   But oh, how heavenly is the smell it breathes after rain, and how glorious is that bark?

I mentioned a cucumber explosion in my last post. Well, this is it:

Seems like one day, I was picking the first little one to have in a salad, and the next we found these and three more besides, all hiding under the leaves and madly growing seedy!  I'm sure it was longer than a day, probably more like a week, but still!  Sneaky!

The magic cottage looks lovely in the golden, early-summer evening light.

I do love it so, and this is my favorite view of it at this time of year:

Mum's Royal Plumbago is going great guns this year too!  Just love those rich, powdery blues.

I know I said no more Firey posts for a while, but how could I not post these?  Andrew off on his first call-out to a bush fire:

And coming back some five hours later, safe and sound, but slightly smelling of smoked... well, smoked man I suppose.  :)

Other than that he's been doing plenty of electronics, and that makes Andyroo a happy chappy.

I love this photo of him, it shows my darling as the sweet soul that he truly is, and the next one cracks me up.  That befuddled gaze through his magnifying visor, so funny.

That t-shirt is his Nanowrimo support crew t-shirt.  He's had it for years.  It says, "I'm a lover not a writer."  Yep! (Although I'm sure he could be a writer if it took his fancy!)