Where are you...

...I am looking high...

...and low for you...

...ah, there you are...

...you know I will always find you...

and just for that I will give you a 'kiss'...


Our cat Matilda has for reasons best know to herself has taken a liking to these two small bears - she will hunt them out if we move them and carries them off like a mother cat carries her kittens.. We will come home to find these two in all sorts of places...

She also has a little striped mouse which regularly gets a beating - we often find it on our bed - perhaps as an offering... P says he can only imagine what she would bring home to us if she was an outside cat...

Storm Damage...

We had a storm in Melbourne last Thursday... It created havoc and damage in a number of suburbs including ours...We sustained a minor inconvenience when our kitchen began 'raining' on the inside but it was nothing that couldn't be swept up or dried out - most of my cook books got some sort of water damage as they were directly under 'the shower'. P laid them all out across the floor and most since have dried out... We also had some guttering which came away from the roof on the other side of the house - we think a combination of the wind and the sheer volume and weight of water was enough for it - the guttering - to give way... Nothing which can't be fixed...

However we live directly across the road from a pocket handkerchief park which as you can see from the photos felt the fury of the elements - some of these trees are quite big and thankfully there was no one in the park at the time as at its centre there is a children's play area... I have chosen a few to show you but really the photos don't do the size of the branches justice...

The third and fourth photo shows how fickle fate can be and in this case for the better - this tree is very close to a main road which from about the time of the storm would have been very busy traffic wise from a number of local schools - if the wind had of taken these branches out across the road there would have been traffic problems - at the very least... If you look closely you can see some SEC tape around it which means it had been attended to as best as possible during the storm...

I am sure some of these trees will have to be cut down as they lost major branches which would make them more vulnerable to future wind and torrential rain... Such a shame as they are beautiful and I never tire watching them as the light dances across their leaves as they move in the breeze...

Dragon in a Wagon

This is one of E's latest - I don't know whose face I love most....

2012 & a spider's web...

2012 Official Movie trailer
Uploaded by pannuzzio. - Watch feature films and entire TV shows.

We went to see the movie 2012 today. For those of you who don't know about it, the premise is based around the Mayan calendar which suggests that life on this planet is about to change come 21/12/2012 . Basically it predicts the end of the world as we know it - in the movie's tell it is in the worst possible way. There is the usual plot line - discovery of a catastrophe, estranged family, political conspiracies, a race against time, the chosen few (mainly those with billions of euros) who are going to be saved in luxury type 'Arks' and the human moral conscience. Lots of special effects and some little predictable bits - watch closely where the crack travels on the painting of God's finger touching Man - P and I picked up a few little 'mistakes' - that I guess if you are making a film about the end of the world you can afford to be liberal here and there...

I am not sure how I felt when the movie finished. Do I believe it - about the end of the world - not sure to be honest... I would like to think that it is all mythology but I do have this niggling doubt - for too long we have been too complacent about the damage we are doing to this planet - while it is suggested that this time around the Earth's destruction is based on a planetary aliment rather than man made tampering I am still not convinced. The human race as a whole does a lot more 'taking' than 'giving' and as I write this I am less sure - we - the human race - are invincible - that is truly a myth. What do we do now? I guess the trick is to keep going - if it is going to happen whether it be 2012 or tomorrow - we have to keep moving forward with perhaps a little more stillness at times and an appreciation for the 'finer' things in life - hence my very bad photo of this morning's find in the garden...

An Echo in the Bone...

We had a surprise visitor into the shop today - Diana Gabaldon. She would be one of my favorite authors and I have followed her characters - Claire and Jamie - throughout their adventures over the last 17 years or so...

Cross Stitch was the first book in Diana's Outlander series, it was followed by Dragonfly In Amber, Voyager, The Drums of Autumn, The Fiery Cross, A Breath of Snow and Ashes and lastly - but I believe NOT the last - An Echo in the Bone...

From the first page in Cross Stitch I was transported into the lives of Claire and Jamie - theirs is an unlikely love story, set against a backdrop of Jacobite Scotland.

I remember standing in a bookshop around about 1992 reading these opening lines from Cross Stitch...

" People disappear all the time. Ask any policeman. Better yet, ask a journalist. Disappearances are bread and butter to journalists.
Young girls run away from home. Young children stray from their parents and are never seen again. Housewives reach the end of their tether and take the grocery money and a taxi to the station. International financiers change their names and vanish into the smoke of imported cigars.
Many of the lost will be found, eventually, dead or alive. Disapperances, after all have explanations.
Usually."

... and from that moment been hooked. Little did I know then that I would be reading the seventh book in 2009...

I must admit that I was excited at meeting the woman whose writing has kept me entertained all of those years. Diana was both charming and patient, posing for photos and signing copies of her series in the short time she was with us. And guess what? I have my own personally signed copy!!!!!!