New Beginnings

I often find this time of year very reflective. The crazy busyness of the holiday season tends to bring out hours of thought and assessment of the year that will soon be over and the new one just around the corner. 

For awhile now I've been looking for a change. A new challenge to sink my teeth into. So I decided to apply for uni. I'm very excited to say that I have been offered a place next year to undertake a graduate diploma in arts management! I think this is the intellectual challenge that I've been looking for. 

While I don't remember the enrolment process being quite as involved last time round, largely to do with the questions asked for their statistic data collection, it was relatively easy and I'm looking forward to it. There seem to be a few people I know who are going back to or are already studying so I'm in fine company.

So now that I've enrolled it's time to start getting ready and also to enjoy a bit of pre-studying time as I'm sure I'll be busy next year!

Melbourne's weather has held up its reputation in the last couple of weeks. After a scorching 38˚C day followed close to a week of low twenty degree days. Sadly the respite is over and tomorrow we are expecting it to warm up to 37˚C. Of course Melbourne being the fine city that it is... Monday we're expecting rain and the temperature to drop back to 20˚C again. 

My plan is to drop the blinds in the house, crank up the fan and hope that the apartment retains the lovely coolness that we've cultivated over the past few days until the cool change comes through. Sadly I don't think I can haul all the plants back in off the balcony to do the same... something about most of them liking sunlight.  I really hope that they'll be okay in the heat as it was the heatwaves that decimated our balcony garden last time!

Our garden has grown a little with the addition of borage, soapwort, woad and some alpine strawberry. 

The borage is looking a little worse for the wear after spending two days in transit before seeing the light of day. Luckily the latter three are quite hardy and have perked up quite nicely after planting, a good water and some sun. 

Today we had our first harvest of spinach:

This was happily eaten for dinner along with some delicious wagyu burgers. 

I was also very happy to see the first zucchini buds for this year:

There really is something quite soothing about spending time tending to plants. Not to mention the immense satisfaction of harvesting your own home grown produce! 

Intentions

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.” 
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

After a hiatus of close to 18 months I've decided to pick up my proverbial pen and start writing again.
It's taken me nearly two years to find my words again and if I'm being honest with myself I'm still finding the words to express myself after what were some of the hardest times in my life so far.

In the last 18 months I've been learning a bundle of new hand crafts including spinning yarn and weaving which have both taken up a bit of room but made me immensely happy. There's lovely sense of achievement processing raw fleece and turning it into yarn which you then make into something. Not as hard as you might think either!

I'm teaching myself to weave on a rigid heddle loom and so far my projects have been limited to some sample fabrics, scarves and tea towels. I have a vague obsession with the idea of making tea towels. Everyone one needs tea towels right?

Earlier this month I was lucky enough to head to New York with Andrew for a week long holiday. We saw some shows (Warhorse, Once, Bring it On, Peter & The Starcatcher, Newsies and Spiderman), ate some great food (a lot of pizza) and caught up with some friends. It was just the change of scenery that I needed.

Oh and we narrowly missed Hurricane Sandy. We flew out just before they closed New York. Despite watching the news while we were there, as the US Election was on, we managed to not hear a thing about the storm until we were at the airport where a little girl kept repeating "Mommy are we flying into the storm?". We thought she was referring to a thunderstorm.

A week after returning from NY I started work on a short touring gig which was great fun. Now that I'm back from travels, both work and play, I'm back into a bit of a nesting mode as we've just planted our first lot of plants in our second attempt at a balcony garden. Our new balcony has a lot more  light than our old one did. We also have a translucent blind now which means that we can actually see the plants so with any luck it will be harder to forget that they're out there.

We managed to (miraculously) germinate from seed some tomatoes, basil and capsicum. It was one of the most exciting things to wake up and discover a tiny shoot of green in the pot of dirt that hadn't been there when you went to bed last night. Possibly I need to get out more... but it was exciting to me! We've also planted some spinach, rosemary and zucchini seedlings.

Hopefully all the plants will have had the chance to establish before the blistering hot Summer hits. On that note it's time to check on them. It's our first 38˚C day this year... of course this being Melbourne we're set for storms and the low 20˚s tomorrow. Love it!

Failure to Write

In the wee small hours of the morning, when the whole wide world is fast asleep I'm lying awake wondering why it is I've got Carly Simon stuck in my head when I've been listening to Edith Piaf's rendition of L'accordéoniste on loop all day.

I'm frustratingly nocturnal at the moment. Frustrating because I have two LX plots to attend tomorrow and I'd like to be awake for them please. As well as tickets to see Don Giovanni. Again with the awakeness.

Since I wasn't sleeping anyway, I figured I might as well update my sorely neglected blog.

Let's see, last time I wrote I'd just planted a mini-herb garden for a show. Well, the season went really well. So well in fact that Kat & I don't own any plants (dead or alive) from the show. Since then I've moved onto another show and am in the process of looking for more work over the silly season. Mind you I think I could do with a couple of days off to sort out my body clock and get a little R&R but we'll see. Plenty of time for that when the theatres are dark again.

Other items of note in no particular order are:
- my shoulder (which I fell on about two weeks ago after a particularly sleepless night... futons should never be underestimated for danger, can anyone say trip hazard?) is feeling much better but is at the annoying stage where it feel good but as soon as I do anything more than hold a cup of coffee in my left arm it begins to complain. Not that I've been doing anything but resting it of course... ahem

- Mum's started her next course of chemo after a week's break last week. For some reason I kept thinking it was her last course last time... hopefully this is the one. She's getting great results from the treatment but I think she's looking forward to stopping the chemo.

- I've made it further on my NaNoWriMo novel this year than ever before, but I'm still many thousands of words behind where I should be. Perhaps I should attack that instead of this blog... I should probably also note that I'm only ahead of my previous attempts by about 1,000 words... oh well, only 48,000 more to go...

Anyhow, that's all that springs to mind at the moment. I think I'm approaching the "low" in my sleep/wake cycle, so I'm going to make another attempt to fall asleep. Wish me luck!

Greens

The show I'm working on at the moment calls for a herb garden. Given our rather tight budget, Kat (the set/costume designer) and I decided to donate a small herb garden. The best part was planting all of our random plants into our make-shift container.



Here we have the main container (the no-weeding required garden) which has basil, tomatoes, cos lettuce, parsley and some random flowers.



This is the second container (weed-me!) which contains baby corn, more tomatoes, more parsley and more lettuce as well as some weeds from outside the cafeteria.



We love our garden and hope that it's still alive in three weeks time when the season closes...

Ladybugs & Hedges

Tomorrow we wish the Beach House goodbye. The house is empty now and it looks great!

I spent today cutting the hedge in our courtyard today. I swear it's at least a third bigger than it was when I started. Should have done a before and after shot. Suffice to say I took off enough foliage to fill four large garbage bags. I discovered that we had many ladybugs living in our hedge which was great. I love ladybugs. I did however either get poo-ed on by a lady bug while trying to move it. Either that or it was laying an egg but with my limited knowledge of ladybug biology, it's hard to say. Suffice to say it left something long and green behind as it walked. I'm not sure how I feel about the whole incident... a little amused I think :)

We made Mum a roast for mothers' day and I've eaten way too much. It was just soooooo good though! There's sticky date still to be eaten... Possibly not for a few hours yet. Damn my lack of self-discipline when it comes to eating. I even got some really nice vanilla custard to go with the pudding... It would seem that I'm a little food obsessed at the moment.

On a more travel related note though, I've finally set up the photo hosting site at Zoto so that I can post some photos there and link some to here. For anyone curious about Herman I've posted a picture of our little friend. Here's hoping that link works!

Home Day

My day couldn't have been much lazier today and I love it!

I have managed to clean out Herman's cage though which makes both Herman and I happier. It's currently drying outside while he's exploring his temporary cage. I don't think he likes it much really.

Rather excitingly for me I've "harvested" my first and currently only jalapeno chilli from my new chilli plant that I got the other day on a whim. I've always wanted to grow my own herbs, just don't use them enough to warrant constantly buying them. Besides, it renews my quest to prove to myself that I don't kill every plant I ever touch... that remains to be seen of course! I also figure Gene will enjoy the chillis when he gets back. If there are any growing that is.

I had dinner with the Nic(k)s last night which was lovely. It's good to see people who are outside of work at the moment!

It hasn't even been a week and I'm missing Gene already. Well okay that's been happening for many days now, but I'm not completely lost yet! I really do miss having someone to come home to. It's more the someone to wake up with when I think about it. Even though I'm not the biggest morning person, there's something special about the first moment you wake up in a day.

Okay, enough inside time for today. I'm going for a walk. Besides, I'm spending much too much time looking on eBay!

There's No Place Like Home

Typical that the one day that I needed to jump on City Link the freeway was closed... I ended up running late because I didn't know about the detour until after I'd left. Mum and Dad looked pretty excited to see me and I think my grandparents were just tired given that it was 3am. We managed to get home at about 4am and then spent the next hour talking tiredly about the trip. I got given my new phone and mp3 player but was so tired I couldn't remember the PIN on my phone...

Having gotten to bed at 5am... I decided to wake up at 8:45am to play with my new phone. It's a Sony Ericsson K508i which is the first non-Nokia phone I've used. Aside from the rather strange predictive text (the space key is in a different place) it's really good. I still can't recognise my ring tones though... I'll have to work on that!

Mum and Dad brought back a whole heap of fascinating things to play with... like the papyrus note paper that I can was and reuse... the distilled oils for helping with stomach problems and pure perfumes. Mum also got me some great earrings. Dad came back with some great t-shirts too from The Esplanade. They've also got some great photos from the trip which I'm looking forward to seeing.

It's good to be back in my own place. Gene and I have made an effort to settle back in here after moving all our stuff back from Mum & Dad's place.

Today I attacked the hedges in the courtyard with the new hedge clippers... they're shockingly blunt... I should have remembered to spend a little more on them... would have saved my arms a bit! We're going to need to jump up on the fence to cut the front and top of the hedge too... I did't do too badly... It's my first time cutting a hedge and I'm hoping that I didn't do too badly by the plants! There was this rather annoying creeper though that's grown... I should pull that out... it just tangles into the hedge making it hard to trim. I don't think it's meant to be there.

I should be at a going away party tonight. Gene cooked a deliciously large steak for dinner tonight and we ate until we were bursting (not a smart move) and then I ended up falling asleep. I'm still feeling rather groggy and tired from the hedge cutting. I think I'll spend some time going through more of the stuff in boxes/bags. We have patches of floor that aren't covered in boxes in our room... it's getting better. Gene's supreme effort has reclaimed some of our floor back. We hope to have conquered the carpet space again in a month's time at latest.

Paperwork, here I come.