Firstly a belated HAPPY NEW YEAR! For the first time in many years I stayed up to watch because I was sucked into the hype on TV about how wonderful they'd be. And they were. I almost think watching them on TV is better because the display covers most of the inner harbour and one can't see it all from ground level or even from a high rise. Also, on this night, it was very still and the smoke just hung in the air. It would have impeded the view for those on the ground. I love to watch stuff come off the bridge but you have to be facing the bridge to get the full effect. At any rate, I ate cheese & crackers and spreadable smoked salmon and drank a margarita instead of tacking the full bottle of bubbly in the fridge.

My apologies for the gap in posting (you must be really tired of hearing that). My dear MIL came up for the weekend between Christmas and New Years and for the most part I have been busy with other things. Exciting things like weeding and tearing out ivy, pruning the plum tree, picking berries and making jam, untangling financial stuff that had piled up while I was gone, doing laundry and ironing, you get my drift. Today I am due to mow the lawn but we've suddenly had a cold front go through and it's bloody cold out. No good for hurrying along tomato plants. I planted some watermelon and pumpkin is the vast emptiness but they would really like hot weather. I've had poor germination on beans as well, so this may be a very sparse year.

I am reading Peggy Osterkamp's third volume in her series New Guide to Weaving which is Weaving & Drafting your Own Cloth. This is about how to weave, and boy I wish I had read it before I went to the Weavers School. I was such a total newbie. I didn't know how to sit down and weave cloth, because I'd never actually done it (a scarf doesn't count). I'll admit the section on troubleshooting and all the things that can go wrong is daunting because I'm positive every one of them will happen to me, but everything I've read to far has been helpful. Mind you, she has her prejudices, but every weaver does and you just have to try and get more and more opinions and examples.

P.S. Mowed lawn, took out the "lady's chainsaw" and cut up the piece of dead plumcot into pieces small enough to get into the traskpack, cut down 2 of the main offending shrubs in my neighbour's back yard (with his permission) but the chain jammed and my skill with a chainsaw was exhausted, mulched zucchinis (flowering) and cucumbers (flowering) and fertilized them, watered the citrus, rescued a pot of portulaca that had been sitting totally neglected since before I went overseas and managed to divide and plant 5 seedlings. I swear you cannot kill portulaca. It will be perfectly happy and flower its little head off in a terracotta tub for the rest of the summer whether I water it or not.