Oh dear.......

Last Wednesday we enjoyed the fiddle concert, in fact all week we attended several concerts and heard some great music.  However, Wednesday wasn't all good.

We took the bus to town because the bus service during the music festival is excellent, and there is a bus stop directly across the road from us.  Spent time at the concert, had lunch, wandered around, chatted to friends, listened to more music, bought ice creams, then because it was hot we decided to catch the 2 P.M. bus home.  Just before leaving home we had turned on the cooler, and during the ride home we were looking forward to walking into a cool house......

......but alas, it was not to be.......

......the hot water tap under the kitchen sink had become disconnected, and hot steamy water was pouring through the kitchen and onto carpets.  The smell has been quite nasty.  We contacted our insurance company who sent a remediation company to take up the damaged carpet and see what damage there was.  They have been and gone today, and the damage is so much worse than we had realised; all the carpets in the family room, bedroom hallway and in our formal living/dining room will have to be replaced.  The bottoms of two bookcases in the living room are soaked, fortunately the contents seem to be all right.  Kick boards have mould behind them, the kitchen has signs of water damage on kick boards, and some of the floor tiles are now loose.  We don't know what damage has been done to the kitchen cupboards, so we don't know if the entire kitchen will have to be replaced too.

We also came home to a blackout because the water had shorted the dishwasher power point under the kitchen sink.  The plumber came, the electrician came, we mopped and mopped and mopped and laid towels on the carpet, but obviously it wasn't enough to deal with all the water.

The remediation folk have left two noisy industrial fans blowing to help dry out any residual moisture.  They are very efficient, but did I mention that they are very noisy?

Right now we are feeling slightly shell shocked.

Moving onto other stuff.......

Not one stitch has been taken on my row by row because we have been out listening to music so much, but now that the festival is over it will be picked up again.  My painful hip means that sitting is easier than standing or walking, so the hand applique will be a good project.  Today the hip had an X-ray and an ultrasound, tomorrow it is having a cortisone injection.  Won't that be fun?

Next week the uke group resumes after their holiday break, and it's very doubtful if I will be with them.  For quite a while now I haven't been learning anything as the class has sunk to the level of the most inexperienced players and Young Michael the teacher isn't good at standing up to a group of older women.  The music school also offers private lessons about which I shall inquire, but as I can't afford fees for both private lessons and class lessons the decision to drop the class lessons is easy to make.  I'll be happy to join them when they have a gig, if they still want me.

One lovely thing happened today!  Our visiting fiddler and I had several chats about music and I mentioned a Quebecois waltz he didn't know but that I really like, Valse Frontenac.  He left here with a copy of the music and promised to record it for me......which he has, it arrived in my inbox this morning.  He plays both guitar and fiddle on the recording and also said he will play with it, perhaps add more instruments.

Geez, those fans are noisy.

Not sure that the earth is smiling for us right now.

"A home.
After marriage one of the first requirements for happiness is a home.  It will best be found in a house or even a cottage apart from the immediate association of relatives or friends, acquaintances or strangers, and here husband and wife may begin in reality that new life of which they have had fond dreams, and upon their own actions must depend their future welfare."

Once the carpet is replaced and any other necessary work carried out, our home will feel like home again.  It will, of course, mean emptying all cupboards and bookshelves......

Those fans are really noisy.

Enjoy your days!

Would anyone like some heat?

Because we have more than enough to spare.

Never mind, it will be autumn in a few months......

Well, it seems that Ms 64 may be moving after all!  A "For Sale" sign has appeared on her front lawn.   As I said in my last post I thought she was just stirring up trouble when she told Mrs 66 that she was selling up and moving, and I have never been so happy to be proven wrong.  So long as she takes her roaming cats with her.......if she leaves them behind I suspect there will be several neighbours who will be getting a cat trap, because they are the cause of much angst.

Moving on to happier topics!

Our visiting fiddler is a nice bloke and we have all had many chats, both musical and otherwise.  He has been generous with his time and this afternoon helped me with some guitar tuning and tension issues.  He has given us tickets to the Golden Fiddle Award concert tomorrow and we are looking forward to it as there will be excellent musicians performing; after that, he will be heading back to the Big Smoke.

He has been a good sport, too.  Our hot water service has packed it in, so cold showers have been the order of the day!  Today a new system was installed so tomorrow morning's showers will again be warm.  Just as well it's been the middle of summer, because let me tell you washing long hair in cold water is not for the faint of heart.

A little has been accomplished in the sewing room.  Some applique preparation has been taking place and I have now modified the tree patterns a little to make turning the seam allowance easier.  There has also been some gorgeous green fabric dug out of the cupboard, and some pattern pieces have been cut.  It will be a new bag - are these not truly scrumptious fabrics?

The print will be the main fabric, and the shot green will be trim and handles.  Zipper will be black.  It's been in the cupboard for 18 months or thereabouts, so time it was made up.

Oh dear, I am falling apart,  It appears that I now have bursitis in my left hip - it is booked in to be treated next week, not looking forward to that but on the other hand it will be nice to be pain-free again - and I have to learn not to lean on my left elbow while at the computer, or reading, or writing, because the nerve in that elbow is inflamed.  It's now strapped with bright blue tape......talk about a fashion statement!

It's all downhill after 25, you know......

"Premature declaration.
It is very injudicious, not to say presumptuous, for a gentleman to make a proposal to a young lady on too brief an acquaintance.  A lady who would accept a gentleman at first sight can hardly possess the discretion needed to make a good wife."

I would have said the same thing myself.

Enjoy your days!

500th post - fancy that!

According to the counter thingy on blogger this is my 500th post, it was started in October 2008.  That's quite a lot of blather, isn't it?  Sometimes serious, often light-hearted.  If, in those years, I have hurt or offended anyone I humbly apologise - it was never my intention, but after all it is my blog so I can say what I like.

A new project for a new has been started, but has ground to a halt because I don't own a small paintbrush.  It has a pieced background with applique so I thought I would try the freezer paper and starch method, something I have never done before, so took myself off to the computer and sat in front of a tutorial to find out how it's done.  It wasn't a fabulous tutorial because of the tutor's hands hiding what was being filmed but I did get the gist of it, so now all the applique shapes have been traced onto freezer paper, cut out, and ironed to their respective fabrics just waiting for that paintbrush to be purchased.

Monday is usually our day for food shopping and socialising, so in addition to buying bananas and milk and other such exciting items I shall buy a small paintbrush.

The first project for 2017 has been started.

The top picture is part of a row by row (blogged about a couple of months ago) which was a gift from a friend in Victoria, Canada, on our last trip.  The pieced strips in front are the background fabrics for the new project, a row by row from northern Ontario - thank you, Rose Marie!  The fabrics are the same, not surprising since they are all by Northcott (under the 'Archives' tab, 2015 Row by Row Experience), and the Cunning Plan is to turn them both into table runners by adding a narrow dark brown border then a wider pine tree green border.

Today in the Small Smoke it is mild with a pleasant breeze blowing, quite a change from the heat of the past week.  I'm sure it's not just me getting older......something over which I have no control, but I would if I could......but summers seem to be getting hotter than they used to be.  Once we would have the occasional few hot days with one or two very hot to spark us up a bit, but now we have a week of heat wave temperatures.  The past week has been nasty, with nights too hot for refreshing sleep.

Never mind, it will be autumn in a few months......

Late in January there is a big humungous ginormous country music festival held here, and the diehards have been arriving since before Christmas.  They quite happily pay camping fees for that extra month to get a good spot.  Our neighbour across the road refers to them as 'the bumpkins'.  They do, however, spend a whopping amount of money while they are here so we are all nice to them.  We were asked by one of the organisers/performers, who runs a fringe festival within the big festival, if we would billet another performer for a few days and we said yes, so we will be having a really good fiddle player staying here!  Yee har!

A couple of days ago our neighbours at No 66 moved out and soon we will have renting tenants living next door.  Ms 64, the cause of their moving, told them that she would be putting her own place on the market too - she is a nasty woman.  It hasn't appeared in real estate listings so far; we are tipping that it won't appear at all, that she was just stirring up trouble and leaving bad feeling behind.  It is quiet now, they have left a lovely garden behind and Mr 66 was out mowing or blowing nearly every day.

"Politeness.
Politeness is kindness of manner.  This is the outgrowth of kindness of heart, of nobleness, and of courage."

Something Ms 64 is lacking in spades.

Enjoy your days!

Settling back home again

Much as I like being away and coming home, unpacking is not much fun......sorting out stuff, washing clothes, putting things away......but it's nearly all done now.

We had a good time except for the heat.  Fortunately it wasn't ~quite~ as hot as our trip one year ago, but inland Australia is usually hot in summer anyway.  Never mind, in a few months it will be cooler.

We had a fun 2nd birthday celebration with Euan, who says "Hello" beautifully.  He had learned "Hello, Gan-puh" by the time we left.  Me, I don't have a label yet......"Grandma" is still being worked out, it seems.  Perhaps it will be achieved by Easter when we see him again.

 He liked his birthday cake.

We also enjoyed our family Christmas, the first one for a few years!  Usually it's just the two of us.

The night before we left I decided that I needed a 'car knitting' project because we would be spending a long time driving, so yarn bought last April in Bendigo, needles and pattern were taken along.  The first stitches were cast on as we left town here, and when it was all measured yesterday - the day after returning - this much has been done of the back, only a few more centimetres remain to the armholes.  Colour is light blue with a hint of lavender.

 Just think of all the knitting time which would have been wasted if it hadn't been taken along!

A day or two before we left the final stitches were taken on Winding Ways, and it was finally photographed yesterday.  As you can see not all black is dark, and not all white is light.

 The back.......yes, they are cows.  A bloke on the other side of the hill owns them and they often come down our side of the hill.  We don't mind seeing them, but at times it smells somewhat......rural.

The next project will be started soon.  Very soon.

While in Canberra we saw two exhibitions,  One was "Versailles" at the National Gallery of Australia, and while it was interesting I don't think I could have lived in that palace.  By the end of our visit I was just about ready to run through the gallery waving my red cap while shouting "Vive la revolution"!

The second exhibition was, to me, more interesting perhaps because it related more to our lives.  "The Sell" at the National Library of Australia - talk about a trip down memory lane!  The oldest article in this exhibition is a small poster from 1796 advertising a play in Sydney at "the Theatre".  The first European settlement in Sydney was in 1788, so there may not have been many theatres eight years later.

On our way home we spent several days in Gulgong, a small town with an interesting history and many old buildings remaining from the gold rush days, including the Prince of Wales Opera House, a glorified tin shed with wonderful acoustics.  Their annual folk festival was held over the new year weekend, and great fun it was too; we spent time catching up with old friends, and making new ones, and listening to music.  Each night there were sessions to join in - playing and singing in the company of like-minded musical friends is, I think, one of the great joys of life.

"Requirements for a happy marriage.
Respect for each other is as necessary to a happy marriage as that the husband and wife should have an affection for one another.  Social equality, intellectual sympathy, and sufficient means are very important matters to be considered by those who contemplate matrimony."

To which I would add, the ability to stay married while sharing a small - very small - caravan for a few weeks.

Enjoy your days!

Happy New Year!

We are back!

We'll be back in the new year!

Day after tomorrow, Saturday, we will be hitching up our little caravan, climbing into our car and heading south to celebrate a birthday, Christmas, and a new year, so you won't hear from me for a few weeks.

Life here at Chez Wombats has been drifting along.  My Winding Ways quilt is nearly done, yay!   A large amount of bias binding was made and machined onto the front, and is now being hand-sewn down on the back - right now it is three-quarters done.  Once that is finished it will be immortalised in a photograph for the world to admire.......after such a long time it's good to be so close to finishing; the first blocks were made in a class late in 2007.

Some hand-sewing will be packed to take along, and a book of crosswords, and of course a ukulele (that goes without saying), and my tablet loaded with who-dun-it mysteries.  We don't have TV  in our little van, the space it would use is taken by a microwave which, in my opinion, is far more useful, and if we get bored we can always watch our dinner go round and round......and round......a radio/CD player is our entertainment, we can usually pick up a local station somewhere.

There are always new acquaintances to be made in camp grounds, if we hit it off that's good......and if we don't, we can always console ourselves by remembering that it will be a brief acquaintance.

In recent times I have read biographies of two women, one born in England who lived a lot of her life in Australia, another who was born in Australia but lived for a while in England.  "The amazing Mrs Livesey" was about young Ethel Livesey, born in England in 1897, who married as a teenager and had a child to her first husband who was reported killed in World War I.  Her parents took the newborn boy to give her a chance to mourn and gather her thoughts, whereupon she packed her bags and took off for pastures greener and 'Husband' No. 2 - to whom she wasn't legally married, but that didn't stop her claiming his army money.  Forty (forty!) aliases later, eight husbands (many married bigamously), four children, living in several countries, young Ethel was never one to let the grass grow under her feet.  Although the book ends with her death there is even a question about that, because no one knows what name she was using at the time.  Ethel learned as a young woman to always speak well and to dress well, both skills which helped her along her merry way of scamming people......because who would ever believe that such a well-dressed and well-spoken woman could be a confidence trickster?

The second book is "Rosetta", written by Rosetta's great-granddaughter.  Rosetta caused a great scandal in 1905 when she left her prosperous businessman husband and young daughter to run away with a fortune teller......and not only was he a fortune teller, he was half-Chinese, someone who would have been well out of the social circles in which women like Rosetta moved.  They moved to Europe and numbered among friends many of the nobility and even royalty, quite a step upwards fro their earlier life in Melbourne!  The author has woven truth and possible truth together to tell Rosetta's story; much of it is documented in reports of the time, and some from her imagination.  From the day Rosetta left until she died she and her daughter never met again, although it turns out they lived not far apart.

We tend to think of ancestors and people of earlier times as living dull lives, but obviously that wasn't always the case!

"Manners and personal appearance.
A charming manner not only enhances personal beauty, but even hides ugliness and makes plainness agreeable.  An ill-favored countenance is not necessarily a stumbling-block, at the outset, to its owner, which cannot be surmounted, for who does not know how much a happy manner often does to neutralize the ill effects of forbidding looks?"

Obviously Mrs Livesey and Rosetta were both possessed of charm.......it certainly lubricated their way through life.

Until we meet again - no matter where you live or what you celebrate, best wishes for a season filled with peace and love.

Enjoy your days!

We're having a heatwave.......

.......a tropical heatwave......

Today is the fourth day of a very hot five day heatwave, and I for one am over it.  It can go away now.  According to the weather people it is being caused by a large slow-moving mass of hot air moving south from central Queensland.  As far as I am concerned they can have it back - we wouldn't want to deprive them.

On to happier topics.

The quilting is all done on my Winding Ways quilt, the last stitches were taken yesterday.  Now to sew a line of stitching around the edges and trim off the excess backing and wadding, and make the binding from a printed black and white uneven plaid cut on the bias.

This fabric - what do you reckon?  I laid it out to get an idea of how it would look, I think it will work well.

Well, the new green glasses are a thing of beauty, to be sure!  As I need to wear them when taking pictures I'm not sure if I can get a photo to show you, but you can see them here, the green/lime colourway.  They are comfortable to wear and seem to do what I need them to do, which is to help my somewhat aging vision......what more could a person need?  They have a slight cat's eye shape, something I haven't worn before.  According to their brand website they are "Urban Kool".  Doesn't that sound like me, Kool to the bootstraps?  (don't forget the capital K, so much kooler than just cool.)

A little sadness here at Chez Wombats, our nice neighbours at Number 66 have sold up and are moving early next month.  We will be sorry to see them go but understand why they are going - their neighbour on the other side, Ms 64, is making their lives very difficult.  Ever since she moved in a few years ago with several unrestrained cats there has been friction and bad feeling (we are all fed up with her free-ranging moggies, even those of us who like cats) which culminated in her bloke and Mr 66 exchanging punches last year when we were in Canada.  It ended up in court and has caused a lot of acrimony, so for the sake of their health they have decided to go.  On the other side two doors away Number 72 is also on the market but not because of nasty neighbours, this is due to a marriage break-up.

A couple of weeks ago while out shopping we bumped into Mrs 66 who told us she had been responsible for capturing a teenage burglar in our street that very morning.  She had been out walking their little pug and was coming back up the street when she saw a young bloke riding slowly, checking out houses and gardens as he went.  She became suspicious then remembered she had left her back door unlocked, so picked up Pud (probably short for Pudding, he's a roly-poly little dog) the pug under her arm and sprinted for home.  Once at her house she saw the bike beside the house across the road and a side gate open so went inside her house and rang the police, who came very promptly - and caught the young bloke in the act with some jewellery in one hand and car keys in another.  He couldn't say "oh no, it wasn't me" could he?  He must have laid hands on a police person too, because one of the charges he faces is assaulting police.  15 years old......why wasn't he at school?  Now he faces a criminal record and time in criminal detention where he will probably learn even more bad habits, and come out with something to prove to himself and society.

Like many communities we here in the Small Smoke have our share of opportunistic crime, some committed by young people who regularly truant from school and think the world owes them a living......a 'skill' probably learned from their parents and grandparents, and so it goes on down through the generations.  However far and away the majority of people here are decent people and a few bad apples don't taint a whole case.

"The pernicious influence of indolence.
If you would preserve your children from the pernicious influence of indolence and all its corrupting tendencies, you must be earnest in purpose, active, energetic and fervent in spirit.  Earnestness sharpens the faculties; indolence corrodes and dulls them.  By the former we rise higher and higher, by the latter we sink lower and lower.  Indolence begets discontent, envy and jealousy, while labor elevates the mind and character.  Cultivate in your children habits of thought which will keep their minds occupied upon something that will be of use or advantage, and prevent them from acquiring habits of idleness, if you would secure their future well-being."

Indeed.  Somehow, though, I doubt that the parents of these young miscreants would understand these words, let alone act on them.

Enjoy your days!