I must have really had my nose to the grindstone this past week and need some serious updates.

Round 6: Can you believe it's taken me this long to post that my boys won AGAIN!! and this time we flogged the hated Brisbane Lions. I have said before Brisbane has gotten old and slow and they showed it one more time this weekend. It is why the once feared Lions and Bombers are at the bottom of the ladder after 6 rounds. Stupid Jason Akermanis was his usual self and punched Crouchy in front of the world, got reported and then got off in the Tribunal AGAIN. Somebody has again started the rumour that Sydney wants him and I can't think of a soul less likely to play the team-style flow that Sydney has perfected than the grandstanding look-at-me Akermanis. To quote Roosy "Given his age I think everyone would concede he still has some really good football ahead of him, but it is not like he is going to play for another 10 years. From our point of view we will just wait and see what happens over the course of the season." Why would we want an injury-laden 30-year old? Our oldest player, Paul Williams, couldn't be further away from Akermanis in all areas of style of play. Apparently Brisbane is having problems as well because hte salaries they are paying their older players prevents them from recruiting. Darling Jason has been cut from the Lions' side this week.

I had another hard day at work yesterday running around with trolleys of books and pamphlets, etc. Posted Mother's Day present to B, books to BFLB, and birthday presents to Princess A. I had a list of "best books for middle elementary readers" and couldn't find a single one in Dymocks. I have no idea how to recognize a book suitable for an 8-year old but I found 3 that were by the same authors. It's gotten to the point where I can't rememebr what I've sent. I try to buy Australian books but it's hard to find those that don't scream it by being Aboriginal dreamtime stories.

I decided to include a token photo of the second WW2 sock because otherwise there would be precious little knitting con tent to this blog. I knit on it every day which included ripping out an inch of ribbing because I discovered I had soemwhere along the line started knitting in the wrong direction. No one would ever know except I go back and try and straighten errant stitches and it turned out than one such stitch was a twist going in the wrong direction. I know i am not trying to match commercial socks exactly but I'd like them to be as close to perfect as possible once Ian has his uniform together. He is currently hunting for a mannikin he can afford so if anybody outthere has a mannikin, let me know!

I have been informed to discard the jumper mentioned earlier in the blog and I have added a link to Thomas Mann's reply paper for any librarians out there who read this.

When I came home yesterday I noticed that our street tree, an Argyll apple, is blooming. A lesson on eucalypts in now in order. There are 500 species of eucalypts and they grow everywhere from rainforest to snow. They are not deciduous, but drop leaves all years round and can restrict themselves during drought by dropping whole branches. There is some species blooming all year round to feed all the birds who feed on nectar or the bugs that live on the leaves. Our street tree is the only gum tree we have and it is large but certainly not as big as some of the biggest gums. It has rough reddish bark and pale silvery leaves with creamy-white fluffy flowers. I have no idea why its common name is apple but it might have something to do with the quality of the wood. Argyll comes from the area we live in where it is native. Canberra originally planted "exotics" (non-native) trees as street trees and the older suburbs have flowering cherries, or oaks. There are oaks around a street near us. Now only natives are planted. The idiots who owned our house when we bought it attempted to plant things like lilacs and flowering cherries under a gum tree which is insane, because gums are very good at getting every drop of water that they can reach and nothing much grows under them.

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