Best wishes for a happy and healthy 2014!

It's already afternoon on the first day of the new year here, before you know it 2015 will be upon us.  Not that I am wishing my life away, but we all know that time flies faster as we get older, don't we?

Did you all have a good Christmas?  We did, it was quiet and peaceful and our lunch at a local restaurant was excellent.  We even had some rain!

A wonderful way to start the new year - stitches have been sewn!  This morning I was able to sew on a button which came off one of my buttoned shirts (which are still pretty much all I can easily wear) and was so emboldened by that success that after lunch the remaining rolled hem finish on the skirt centre back seam was done.  Next step is to press that seam, then pin and sew front to back.  If the shoulder lets me I will do that later, if not.....well, there is always tomorrow isn't there.  In just four weeks we drive to Canberra for the wedding, so that is the looming deadline.

Speaking of the shoulder, it appears to be doing well.  It is very sensitive to touch and my long hair brushing across it feels like broken glass, which is quite surprising and rather painful.  It is still stiff and sore too but the exercises are being done daily, and movement is gradually coming back.  The uke hasn't yet been touched, but on 11th of this month we are having a rehearsal for The Big Gig the following week - I will be there, and I will be playing.  Even if I have to play my little $50 soprano uke rather than my very beautiful new larger much better sounding (and considerably more expensive) tenor uke, I will be playing that day.

Our roses are blooming, aren't they pretty?  I don't know their names because they were in the garden when we moved here.

 While these pics were taken a couple of summers ago the roses look just the same now.

One of three red roses, all different.  The miniature rose in the header pic changes colour as it blooms, the horticulturalist who worked on the garden called it a chameleon rose.  There is also a yellow rose which seems to be struggling, we get one or two flowers a year in spring and that's that.  Such a shame, because I really love yellow roses......perhaps we should replace it.  Because of the low humidity here roses seem to do fairly well, except for that yellow one; our neighbour has some beautiful yellow roses, must ask her their name.  In the Victorian language of flowers a yellow rose stood for "decrease of love".......does that mean if you were given a bouquet of yellow roses it would be a means of saying goodbye?

"Morning receptions, as they are called, but more correctly speaking, afternoon parties, are generally held from four to seven o'clock in the afternoon.  Sometimes a sufficient number for a quadrille arrange to remain after the assemblage has for the most part dispersed."

Perhaps this explains why "morning dress" seems rather formal when compared to what most of us wear before lunch?  I could stay, because I know how to dance a quadrille......several quadrilles, in fact.

Enjoy your days!