Druids and allsorts!

It's autumn, but there has been hardly any rain. We're still turning out to fires, mostly ones lit by people who aren't very aware.  They light a small fire and don't put it out properly, or they light too big a fire for the dry conditions. Ah well, at least it keeps us busy.  And dirty...

...but not in a good way!

I need to talk about the Druidcamp.  It was while back now but it was most marvelous.

Damh the Bard, Cerri and Kristoffer were so lovely.  As I've said before, if you want to see what a spirituality or philosophy will do for you, look at its leaders, and you couldn't ask for for kinder, wiser, more connected beings than these three.

I learned a heap, and laughed and cried a lot, and some of the moments in the ceremonies and bardic circle and giant music session were just mind blowingly amazing.

Julie, Tamzin, Cait and I performed Savage Daughter together at the eisteddfod.

Afterward at the bardic circle, I did my new song called King of the Boars that I wrote for my new lyre, Torc.  I love this pic Michelle got of me.

I look a lot more relaxed than I

felt!

I also got to spend time with my Druid peeps!  Yay!

Selfie with Mandy, and a photobomb by Damh the Bard and Kris!  Did you ever!

On the plane with lovely Michelle and my Druid brother Dusty!

My dear druid sister Trudy!

       
And we explored a bit of gorgeous Adelaide.  The botanical gardens are lovely, as is the old architecture, and they have a lot of art and quirky bits that I loved, except the moment where I thought i was about to fall down these stairs, though it turned out there was glass over them!  The sculpture at the bottom looks a bit worried that he might have had to catch me!  

Around here, things go on as usual.  The last chicks of the year are growing up. both roosters, dammit, but being part Hamburg, they aren't very big so won't be able to bully the girls, or very loud crowers, so they might be able to stay.  Frankendotte has gone to live with mum's partner, Karl, and his hens.  He is rechristened Frank Sinatra for his singing, which Karl loves.  A lucky break for Frank!

One of the so called Hamburgs is definitely not all Hamburg.  He is rather hideous in the face right now but his plumage is pretty and interesting.  He was christened Chugly (chicken ugly) for a while but he's now called Bunky, short for Shubunken, because of his goldfish colouring.

The other one is classic Hamburg and is The Cisco Kid because of his embroidered black and white appearance.  He is super pretty, which makes Bunky look worse.

I'm crocheting a blankie for my friend Amy, and as usual Mr Kitty has to help.

He's such a lovey.

I've been passed as a driver for the big ICV in our comms brigade (incident control vehicle).   

We turned out to the late shift with our comms brigade to a large fire and got to see our brigade mates from Chidlow VBFB.  Ha, I wasn't the grubbiest for a change!  Away from the fire, it was cold out there!  It seems silly to be fighting fires while it is cold, but there you have it. 

It was hectic at first.  We arrived to find many appliances and support crews on the boards to keep track of with our very good crew ...

 ...but as the fire was blacked out, trucks were stood down, and the night drew on, the number of fireys dropped, and by the time we left at 2am, it was quite spooky out there. Just one lone guy from the water truck wandering in to find coffee and food at the blessed Salvos truck!
  

No rain, but we know autumn is here because the Virginia Creeper has once more turned.

  I found one of my books on the feature wall at our local library.  Yay!

Roo and i got to turn out to a fire together in the back of the truck.  Also yay!

Yes something weird happened to my face.  Other than me just being weird as usual. 


We had some of our Druid mates over for a Samhain night.  It was lovely getting to see my  friends enjoying playing my lyres. They're so calming to play.  
 

   

            Also Guinevere felt she should be part of the night, and Michelle got a pic of her for me.

Michelle also made me this quilt!  Squeeeee!

It has the rune Ansuz on it, for my patron god, Odin, and for inspiration and skill in communication, and the two ravens who accompany Odin, Huginn and Muninn.  I just can't even begin to say how much I love and appreciate this gift and all the work and skill she put into making it!  I love you Michelle!

This gorgeous old Jarrah tree was on the side of the track we walked one morning this week.

Look at all the liminal space, and the face too!

Michelle also got this pic of my dear Rosie, who is 11-and-a-half now and showing her age a little more lately.

My sweet sweet baby, how did you get to be an old dog so suddenly?            


      

A Mothers Day Gift For You

 

A free new story for you! 

Happy (and scary) Mothers Day!

https://tlmerrybard.com/just-one-night-in-the-land-of-fire/ 

Wanderer on Anglo-Saxon Lyre

Wow, finally got around to recording a new song! 

It's "Wanderer," originally done by Leslie Fish.  It's one of my faves to sing as I go about the place doing chores. 

It's about Odin, so of course I love it, but also I like the theme of changing your fate (your Wyrd) by how you comport yourself in the world. 

"Pattern’s always weaving

More than you can see

With courage, wit and kindness

Strength and honesty

You’ll weave the pattern round you

Better than you know

Take the old man’s blessing

That he’ll give before he’ll go."

     

Whatcha Been Doin'?

I don't know about how the other folks live, but around here it's been socialising and chores all the way.

Yesterday we moved our shed...

With the help of some of our Firey mates, it was lifted, moved back and reslabbed before I even had a chance to put my shoes on!  Thanks guys!

Amazing how much extra space you get for such a small move.  Now to decide what to put where in front of it.  The dogs and I fancy a bit of cool grass to sit and roll on.   Haven't had grass in all of the nearly ten years since we've been back here.  I want to put in a deciduous tree of some kind too,  and have my vegies back in a 'zone one' area (for all you permaculture nuts out there).

It was my 52nd birthday just before christmas.  It coincided nicely with our beach meet up with the druids, and I can't think of any nicer way to end my special day than at the beach with lovely people and ukuleles.  :D  The sky was amazing, and yes we had a swim, though it was pretty late and a bit cold before we threw ourselves in.  When I travel that far to see the sea, I'm going to get in if it is at all possible!  I took this just after we got out.   Moon too.  Lovely!

   
On the morning of my birthday I went with my sis, Jen ,to see this pretty boy, and to bring him home too.  She still has Fionn, but he has some way to go yet to be fully healed from the accident she and he had a few months back.   She needed to ride to get her fitness and confidence back before she got back onto Fionn, and this cutie was irresistible!  I can't tell you what he is called yet, because she hasn't decided on a call name.   He's a Connemara Thoroughbred cross and likes to jump, just like Jen does!

She hasn't loved all my suggestions for names.  What's wrong with calling him Heimdall or Gimli?

My little chickies are doing great.  Growing well and beginning to run back and forth trying out their tiny wings and sorting out a pecking order.   I'd love to give them more space and to see mama take them out and about looking for worms, but they are safe in there.  Two ravens have been hanging around.  I was worried they were after the chicks and they would be if they could reach them, but actually they have been picking up all the high protein chick crumble that gets kicked out.  Never seen a raven and hen this close before...

Sorry Odin, Huginn and Muninn will have to be satisfied with the crumble!

At least two chickies are roosters, I think, including this guy with the mottled face.

Crap photo I know but you can see his patchy face.  He is by far the patchiest. See him here with another chick that I think is a hen, showing the difference in height and shape?

In other news, I managed to finish the latest afghan in time to hand it over to my Bro-in-law at the Christmas party.

It's snuggly.

And I like the pattern.   I went for all single rows of each colour.  It's different but I like the mellowness of it.  That's me behind there, at full stretch! 

  
Not sure what to crochet next.  Another afghan for sure, since I like to do them while I chat to people or watch DVDs in the evening, and I think I know who to make it for, but what colours and pattern?  Hmmmm...           
  

Naughty me!

I never did catch up on my last blog post.  Ah well, busy life means neglected blog!

We've had a bit of social whirl this past week. Andrew went back to work as a fire inspection officer for the shire today so we took our last opportunity for a while to be holiday people.  There was much cafe-going with friends and family, and there were also some brigade meetings and a going away party for one of Andrew's Firey work-mate friends.  Sorry, no pics of that one, I was too busy yakking.  What a great bunch of people!


We did another social event at our fire station on Saturday, inviting two other brigades to come along for brekky. It was good fun. I love it when we network.

Cheers! Great Pic by Dave Ramsay.

That's me bang in the middle wearing my blue Darling Range Brigade t-shirt and my black Sawyers Brigade jacket.  Torn allegiances!  The other Brigade that came along was Chidlow.  There was a lot of chat and much laughter.  Fireys are good people.       

Hi Phil the intrepid BBQer! 

That's my handsome bro-in-law Craig smiling there in the background.


We also did some interesting walks, including another one in a local reserve that is new to us.   It was a very drizzly day, and the water on the young she-oak trees along the trail made for a very pretty walk.

Once more we ended up going a lot further than we had meant to, and once more the sight of the car at last was very welcome.

Yay!  Time to rest my feets!

I finished Niamh's afghan, apart from all the weaving in.  Gawd the colours here are so off compared to the real thing. That yellow is actually a greenish teal, the pink is actually almost white, and there is no purple in it!

Full pic of the finished result soon.  I've also finished a beanie as a gift for someone and was a tad excited about it, because it is super cute, but I can't show you yet.  Oh and Andrew's pointy beanie is so much admired that people keep asking me to make them one, including a complete stranger we met in a shopping centre.  I have no idea why it is so much more noticeable than his old brown and cream one, but apparently now it is in bright colours it is desirable and eye-catching!  Well, it is pretty noticeable.  :D

Now I'm kicking myself that I didn't write up the pattern as I went.

Doopy the car is sporting a sticker showing my allegiance to a certain "Mr Wednesday with the one eye" as I heard him referred to the other day.

I had to buy some new t-shirts and got the sticker at the same time.  I do enjoy a t-shirt with interesting, relevant designs on it.  I hate wearing anything like logos for companies or other meaningless designs.  I love these two, though!

Mr Wednesday again!

Tuppy for sure!

As you can see, I'm trying to brighten up my clothing a bit. It's too easy around here to wear black all the time because of all the dirt, but that's no reason I can't wear something a bit more colourful to go out into the world.    



The native life around here has been going full throttle.  Almost the whole property looks like this at the moment thanks to bandicoots (quendas) digging for insects (loosening more dirt to somehow end up on my clothes!)

And this baby brush-tail possum was seen making for safety up the Illawarra flame tree when we came home from a meeting:

You can't see me. Really you can't.

They are so sweet to look at, but the screeching noises they make while territorial arguments are going on are truly horrific!

This week will be holding a lot of garden work for me, since there are many areas of the block here that need tidying up.  (I'll try to ignore that the block up the road needs even more work.)

I'll also be learning how to use the divi theme I have bought to help me make a whizz-bang Author platform website.  Wish me luck!  Andrew gave me a lesson on how the internetz works, on Friday, and bits of it his diagram that I really didn't need to overflow my brain with just had brackets with the word "magic" written in them.  That made perfect sense to me!  :D  Actually it is all magic even when you know more.  Humans can be so clever.

I twiddled about with the idea of a site icon//navicon over the weekend and came up with this little drawing of Bu, the dog from the Norse world tales.   She'll need some tweaking to make the design perfect for the job, but I love her. She is perky and brave, just like my characters, human and animal, so often are.

  
Have a good week!  See you on Friday!





     

 


       

 

Back to Centre.

We found this lake many, many years ago while riding horses.  Some 30 years in fact!  The brigade has been trying on and off to find it again ever since Angus came across it while fighting a bushfire, and so far it had eluded the searchers, but there it was after all, hiding away in the middle of the bush. We took the 1.4 and took the trails I'd taken on horseback all those years ago.  I was a little bit chuffed to find it where I thought it should be!  It's a great site to use to practice drafting water into the vehicles, and for a little BBQ picnic afterwards!

Last week Andrew was spraying some intrusive tough weeds up at the block (African Love Grass: We do not love it!) and the dogs decided that his mask made him an evil stranger. They wouldn't be convinced by him that he was daddy, so he gave up trying to talk to them and got on with the job, and they came to sit each side of me and be my Black Watch, as mum calls them. I love this row wow bark of Rosie that she does when she is genuinely feeling guardy and a bit worried, as opposed to faking it for fun. It's cute.

The birds in the background are White-tailed Black cockatoos.  They are back in town. It was a lovely evening, made even better because I wasn't the one doing the work!    


I have been getting so jittery, what with one thing and another. I was finding it hard to settle down, but a visit to my inner landscape and a chat with Odin and then Brigid set me back on course.  It is wonderful to be able to access the wisdom of these deities in my life.  I am very thankful for their presence.

With this return to self in mind, I had a centering weekend of doing the homely things I love.  This was made easier because Andrew was off at a training course all weekend, so I had the cottage all to myself (Mwahahaha!)

So, what did I do?  I played a lot of music, both my own on instruments and from itunes and youtube  One thing I did that I hadn't done before was buy and listen to the whole of a Wardruna album in one go.  That was a journey and is definitely the way to listen to their music, but this is one, Odal, of my faves from the album I bought: "Runaljod: Ragnarok".

I did chores in the garden, too, the sort of never-ending ones here like picking up sticks. The chooks came out with me.  They always like it when I do this sort of job because they think I am foraging with them.  It feels very nice to me too.  Very communal and friendly.     

I finished the Baby Buckbeak Amigurumi that I've been neglecting for ages too.  He's a Hippogriff from the Harry Potter stories.

He's cuter than I thought he was going to be when I was halfway done, but a bit of taking apart and restitching of parts and he has come good.  I like how he sits up with his little claw feet in the air!  I wouldn't recommend this pattern for beginners, because it has some gaps where you need to have enough experience to come up with your own solutions. It's a cute result though!  
 
The weather was lovely all weekend.

The chooks took full advantage of it, sunbaking and foraging blissfully.  I'm a bit worried about Sbock, the orange chook here.  She looks like she is a tad off.  More slower movement and a slow blink than anything overt.  Not much you can do with these orange hybrids, they just have a short life and that is it.  Sbock is the last of her generation.  Poor Nanny Ogg will be sad when she goes because she is her oldest living friend.  Nanny is doing great.  She must be close to 8, I think, or even older.  She's seen a lot of orange chooks come and go. 

 

That pose is the sunbaking posture, though, not from any illness.  I had to laugh one time when one of them came right by where I was sitting and just suddenly plopped down with a wing up. I thought she had fainted or dropped dead, but all she was doing was instant sunbaking!  Others came to join her straight away. It must be catching. 

The youngest three; Rover, Spotty and Fido are cheeky monkeys.  I love having free range chooks but they are hell on vegie gardens, and apparently no table is safe either!

Saturday night broke the centering weekend in half with a nice bit of chaos, having a family games night at the station for the brigade's kids.  Andrew did a good job of wrangling some of the younger kids down to playing an actual game instead of running around like loons.

And he turns out to be a bit of a Jenga wizard.

 Sunday was more music, more crochet, more chores.  All done peacefully and mindfully.  I even videoed myself playing another song on guitar, but I'll post that on Friday.   

Did I get re-centered?  Yes I did.  It was good!  It's always good to come back to what matters to you, and what matters to me that has been missing from my 'life pie' is plenty of alone time to use my hands and mind in peace.  It's easy to forget how important that time is. 

 

Not that you are ever really alone with dogs.   

Today?  Today is back to the practical.  Exposed rough stone is lovely and romantic to live in, till the time comes to try and clean dirt and grease off the rocks behind the oven!  Euuuwwww!  It's all scrubbed now, just have to see how it comes up when it is dry.

    

Ah well, as the saying goes, "Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.  After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water."  It's not what you're doing, it's how you're feeling while you do it that counts!