Down the River

We found ourselves with a bit of a free Sunday, so off to the Swan River we took the dogs.  they had a ball of course.

Lots of tandem toy fetching going on!

These next photos make me laugh because they are before three separate throws, but look almost identical.  Tuppy is bonkers and intense in every one and Rosie is doing this thing she does where she goes out into the water and looks out just waiting for the toy to land in front of her, as if she can magically make it happen by staring.

Come on, hurry up, where is it? says Rosie.

I'm not entirely sure I want give it up yet, says Tuppence.

Alright, we're puffed. Time for treats, dad!

Thanks for the fun, mama!

More Anglo-Saxon Lyre, At Last! (Jabberwocky.)

Well its taken me a while, so long that I've actually got two songs ready to be videoed, but one will do for today.

Jabberwocky has been a favorite of mine ever since I was a child.  I love the strange words and the somewhat creepy, marshy tone.  It always sets my imagination a-whirl.

This is me being all imaginative. 

So, I set out to work out how to play it on my lyre.  There is the classic Donovan version, there is an amazing one done by Omnia, but those didn't quite work for the lyre, which can be a bit finicky as to notes and such you can use.  Tuned from G up to E as it is, there are some songs I just can't get to work with it at all, at least when I just pick it. The range for block and strum is much greater but I prefer my guitar for strummy stuff. 

At any rate, I fiddled and twiddled and sang and messed around with it, trying to keep the right mossy tone to suit it, and came up with this. I hope you enjoy it!

I've written a new song from scratch too, but haven't videoed it yet.  It has passed the test of its first listeners liking it, so it won't be long.  Just need to get my act together to film it.  

Hope the weekend sees you doing lots of fun, creative and social stuff!  Weeee!  (Think the iron tablets are kicking in over here.)   




     
 

More Bonfire!

Heh, I have a new phone and has been fun to work out what it can do that the old phone, a venerable one of Andrew's, couldn't.

It takes pretty good photos of sweet black dogs in evening light.

"It's nearly dinnertime, mama!"

And it takes good photos of husbands having too much fun lighting bonfires, even small ones to fit inside the current burning restrictions.

Yep, way too much fun!  

It can do this, which amuses me mightily! 

And it does good shots of the fire burning lower and lower.

It can even capture that scintillating moment where it is all just coals being lit and dulled by the breeze like so many twinkling Christmas lights.  Sooo pretty!  You should probably embiggen this to full screen to see the twinkling properly.

Rosie was looking up at me, waiting to go in for dinner, in that bottom right corner. My new phone's camera wasn't quite equal to the Herculean task of showing up a black Lab in the night, though!

         

A Little Creativity and a Lot of Bleagh

I have to take iron tablets, and the tablets make me feel crappier than anemia does. Such is the life of someone post Lyme Disease whose body is still sensitized to every damn thing.

Ah well, I naughtily didn't take an iron tablet yesterday just to give me a rest from feeling half-dead, and it was a blissful day indeed!

One thing I was very pleased to get done was this drawing for the Mundaring VFRS cadets' t-shirt/hoodie. It is to go inside a shield and some other lettering and such but the drawing for the design had to be done first.

Not sure, think I'll add raised visors to the helmets, and the hoses need adjusting, but on the whole, I'm ready to take it on to the ink stage, and then we can scan it and play in GIMP with it to make sure it looks good as white ink on navy.  Might go for dramatic lighting and shapes rather than line, not sure yet.  I did a lot of scribbling to get the poses right.

 The cadets wanted it to be serious, so serious I did it.

I've also been able to do a bit more crocheting on the current secret Amigurumi.  I always love this stage.  They look so surprised!

Hee hee.  Poor surprised little Amigurumi.  I wonder what he will become?  (I know of course, but I can leave you wondering!) 

It was cold enough for a fire last night.  Might be tonight too, but after that I won't be surprised if we close up the potbelly for the summer.

The dogs won't appreciate that!

 

Wish me luck, I have a rough few weeks ahead of me with medical stuff, and no easy choices available.  It is a lonely place to be in.    

    

     

Glowing kitties and chickens

This is what happens to an orange kitty when the setting sun shines through smoke.

He is already an extraordinarily dark orange, but add the orange sky and he really did glow.

Yes, that's the fly screen gazebo back up for summer.  Thank goodness, since I have been dodging mosquitoes while trying to get outside time for quite a few weeks now!  It is so relaxing not to have to keep twitching and slapping, and it is already too warm to cover up head to toe as I do in winter.  These days the mozzies here seem to have neither a time nor a season where they go dormant.

Here are our three baby chookies; Spot, Fido and Rover.  They love this perching spot but mostly the big chooks chase them off unless they are out free ranging.

The pics aren't perfect, as the evening was well advanced, but at least they were keeping still. They often run wildly about at this time of night, chasing after flying bugs, and I've even seen one up in the spindly end branches of a low-hanging lucerne tree, picking leaves off! 

Spot is far right.  She is by far the wildest and even pecked me when I had to pick her up.   Sister Jen suggested maybe that was because, with more white on her, she threw back more to the white leghorn in her heritage, and they are a notoriously wild breed. That theory makes sense to me!

Red Rover is darkest, and she is in the middle.  She is also tamest. Fido isn't bad either. I'm not one for handling my chooks all the time. Our set-up makes it hard to catch them, and everyone gets stressed, so mostly I don't handle them at all, and they get used to being around me unmolested.  That way,  if I do have to pick one up to check for lice or for doctoring, they are right under my feet, totally unsuspecting, ready to be snatched up. It works for me.

Here's another ginger character who doesn't much like being picked up.  He loves it when I sit down to crochet, though.   

That's a mystery Christmas-prezzie Amigurumi.  I wasn't sure about the colour mix at first but now I have got going I quite like it.

We had a nice quiet Sunday afternoon, with crocheting and music and such, after doing a lot of work in the morning removing fallen tree branches up at the block. The firebreak needed to move due to an even bigger fallen tree branch that is precariously hanging in another tree (you can see it in the background there, squashing the poor old olive tree) so we got to work and cleared up the new area into a bonfire pile and a pile of firewood.

In the afternoon, Andrew did a soul retrieval for me, too.  I needed it done and it isn't the sort of thing you do for yourself.  Having done that and an energy separation ritual that I needed to do for myself, I am back to heading further along the path of my Shamanism studies.

The physical, creative, social and spiritual, these are the things that make up a balanced life and even a balanced day.

The social came into it when we had a good Saturday Morning Schedules at the station. Busy busy busy!

The local Maggies are busy too.  They have a nest in this old Jarrah tree, The Touchstone Tree, I call it, right by the cottage.  Already I can hear the tiny peepings of a newly-hatched baby or two.  Maggies can be vicious in guarding their nests, but our family trusts us and lives in peace with us, and that is a lovely feeling.

   
The sky yesterday was amazing too, as you can see!              
     

                

Whippersnipping.

I've been doing a lot of it.  Apparently its an Aussie thing to call it whipper snipping and it amuses other people.  Brush cutting is what I am really doing since my tool is a bit stronger than the average line strimmer.  Anyway, I've done a lot of it this week, then some of this to recover: Sitting in my folding chair while the dogs pant and recover from all the mousing madness they do while I am busy.  

I was lucky enough to find this when I was under a tree whipper snipping on Wednesday.

It's a tiny nest, the size of my palm, so neatly hidden away, though considering it was only waist-high on me, I do wonder if they managed to safely raise their brood in it!

These pretty blue flowers are coming up in the paddock, patches of colour in what is already mostly dry brown grass.   I'd look them up in my naive plant book but mum currently has it. 

Another day of whipper snipping, another recovery time in the shade!
 

I need the recovery time. Just been told by the doc that my ferritin and hemoglobin is stupidly low.  Don't know how I'm still walking around.  If you know a Lymie, don't go assuming that they are weak.  I may currently have nothing but pink water in my veins, but I still feel better than I did in the bad old lyme days!

Fingers crossed I can tolerate the iron supp I am trying out of desperation.  It is so hard when you react to every damned thing.

Guess who was waiting for us when we came back from the block?  Can you see him under the tree there?  Cyrano is not one of those aloof cats.  He is weird, sure, they all are, but he also loves his people and misses us when we go out.      

 Speaking of aloof, I had to get a photo of this rare event.  Tuppy snuggling!

    
We currently have our old mattress on the floor while we try out a new one, and the dogs think it is great. 

So does the cat.  He reckons every floor should be a nice big squishy bed for cats!

The other thing I did this week was finish painting the new frame Andrew made for this dragon I did for my sis, Jen, many years ago.     

I still have a kangaroo hide lanyard to make, and have volunteered to do a design for the local fire and rescue cadets for their new t-shirts.  Bored?  Me?  Never!

Night Burns and a Double Birthday

Not at the same time, thank goodness!

Firstly, it is Little Miss Tuppence's birthday.  Or it was. I've missed it again.  I keep thinking it is a month earlier, then forgetting the actual date when it comes round!  Oh well, she gets spoiled every day so it makes no nevermind.  She is five now!  Just as sleek and nutty as ever (as I say to her; shiny coat and shiny mind).

She can be a bit of a pain, being such a stress bunny, but she has some charming little ways too, like all her snorts and snoofs, and her kitty-cat smooching style.  Right now she is under the desk with her head on my foot, just as she likes it, and I assure you there is a double bed not more than three metres away that she could be sleeping on wit her mama instead.

Anyway, happy birthday, little Biddy, you are five now!  Where did the time go?

You are a tad bigger than you were when we took this charming photo of you as a pretty six week old baby!

And if course it was also Angus's birthday too!  He was called Rocket in those early days, because he came out right behind the pup ahead of him and the name would have suited him permanently, I think.  From a bleary-eyed and adorable pup at a few weeks old...

  

To the charismatic stunner he is today...

Gorgeous photo by Marilyn Dawson

Happy birthday rocket boy!

This is how blue the sky was when we went up the block a bit later than usual on Sunday.  That is the Grove of Giants back there, standing tall against the azure sky and enjoying the warmth.  You can see how fast the block is drying out.  Hope that means my whipper-snipping and mowing days are nearing a close for this year!

Friday afternoon and evening I did this:

It's interesting that the top photo was taken by me, very shortly before Gogs took the second one, and we were looking back at each other.   That is my Light Tanker there in the distance on the second shot.   Hee hee, yes I do get a bit possessive of 'my' appliances, but then you want an equipment officer to have a bit of passion for the job!

I managed seven hours and saw the start and end of the burn, so am very chuffed with that.

In fact I was this chuffed:

Weeeeee!