When you are 13.
It has been such a pleasure growing old and deaf with this girl. Ama sleeps a lot these days but she always gets up very early for breakfast.
13 remarkable years. She still chases rabbits. In her dreams.
Just imagine a young nature loving Aussie bloke was travelling overseas to Europe for the first time in a few weeks time but had not organised his flights or itinerary, or anything really, nor done any research, etc, what would you suggest he could do that fill up about five days or so?
So far all that I know that has been organised is a flight to London to visit the Kew Botanic Gardens and the Natural History Museum. Then somehow he is to make his way to Switzerland to see his friend and a dipper. Then do something else before flying out to Singapore, a destination for which he hasn’t even booked a flight!
Is this the way of grown men with little travel experience? Anyway, any suggestions for must sees? Plants and wildlife being the key attraction. Let’s not mention the crappy exchange rate. I’ve suggested he take a suitcase of protein bars and chocolate.
Thoughts?
I.
In the last week I have spent 15 hours digging out grass. When I am not digging, I sleep. Thankfully the results are not dull even if I am.
Take care, everyone, and be generous with your kindness.
Kind Regards.
Tracy.
July has been a really big month.
My True Love was discharged from hospital. Some weird shit went down but he’s alive so that is the main thing. Did you know that many elderly people who probably should be cared for in nursing homes are parked in Australia’s public hospital wards, occupying scarce beds? (Note that WP’s AI assistant advises me that the word “probably” is a weasel word. I like the way it thinks. Note too that aged care is the responsibility of the Australian national government while public hospitals are the responsibility of Australian state governments.) Anyway, there were a lot of dementia patients on the ward where my TL was admitted. He wasn’t one of them. Anyway, anyway, the whole family was so happy when our dear one was discharged despite still not knowing what caused the weirdness.
I must have known that my TL was going to have a medical episode. (Have you noticed that the phrase “medical episode” is the latest fad to describe a serious life threatening medical emergency?) I digress. What were the subtle signs of impending illness? Well, I started to dig up my front yard. Long term readers may recall that another medical episode coincided with my last effort to start a verge garden. Anyway, this time I plan to establish a native grassland in my front yard, hopefully before the dirt is blown away in some summer dust storm or something else happens.
Also in July, my son finally moved into his new house. My heartfelt thanks go to my friends who between them supplied my son with enough secondhand furniture and bits and bobs to almost completely set up his house. The universe also provided him with a few freebies dumped or left out in the street for people to take. My son picked up some roadside coat hangers (!!!), some aluminum outdoor chairs in good nick and this practically new recliner (!!!!).
Who dumps a new recliner in a conservation area? My theory is that someone died in that chair so the grieving parties decided to offload the chair with minimum fuss by dumping it in our conservation area. My son found the same type of chair selling online for $600. Anyway, I rang the government to report it and the person I spoke to said they would add it to the next bulk waste run. Suffering succotash, by the time that happened, the chair would be ruined rain pending! So we took it home. It’s very comfortable and doesn’t smell.
Ama had her own weird medical episode. She’s not a young dog. But she survived. Fynn got another year older. Here he is on his birthday. It was a very cold, rainy day.
Fynn had special icecream as a birthday treat. He thanked us by weeing in the hallway. Fynn doesn’t like rain.
Plus other stuff happened, but these were the highlights.
I hope your July was a good one. Take care, everyone.
All the best.
Tracy.
Here I am. A poem for a new day.
After much silence
The twitteratee twitter.
Is this my good side?
Perhaps I am anxious. The longer I stay away from this place, the harder it is to make an appearance. Start with something you love is good advice. Who doesn’t love little birds?
🙂
Take care, everyone.
Kind Regards.
Tracy.
I’m late. I’m late. That is the tenor of my life recently. One of my sons is house hunting and like hundreds of other parents, each weekend we trudge around with our adult children hoping against hope that we will find something in their price range.
The houses are always so interesting. The building reports are complete fiction and the marketing descriptions are pure comedy. Sometimes the effort is rewarded in unexpected ways. Yesterday we went to a house that was redolent of Sarawak. I once lived with some people who hailed from that region. It was a real blast from the past. A gift. Thank you, house.
Dear Readers, please excuse this fooling around with photos. Apparently the colour management of my various photo editing software programs in relation to different browsers and various other confusing stuff is confusing. So I am experimenting. Blimey, as they say in the classics. Just ignore me. Or you could tell me whether the spider looks orange, brown and cream? Anyway, just in case you are interested, we think this is a some type of lynx spider. Have to get the colours right so we can ID it. Long story.
Kind Regards.
Tracy.
Happy birthday to our darling girl, Makea, who turned 11 today.
How about we sing a song for her? Happy Birthday To You? Nope, I know a better one. She will love it. It’s the delightful Jenny Morris singing “She Has To Be Loved”. There aren’t many words so sing it with me.
Kind Regards.
Tracy.
When I was a kid, we used to sing a little ditty at school. It went like this.
“We had joy, we had fun, we had prickles in our bum,
and the hills that we climbed were a bloody waste of time.”
Do you know it?
For some reason that little earworm sprung to mind as I was thinking of how to break the news to you, or not, as the case may be. It seems that I lost over a third of my blog subscribers a week ago. Like many, I suspect I have a number of subscribers that don’t actually read. Because they are not real people. I hope it is these that have vanished, perhaps as a result of some mysterious internet purge. I don’t know why. These things happen. But you are here. Hopefully. So, hi.
Thanks for sticking around. We have fun. Or at least, I do.
Take care not to be caught up in the purge, readers.
Kind Regards.
Tracy.
Reflections of An Untidy Mind 