Where have I been? Working, thinking about my friends and family so far away, trying to get ready for retirement and downsizing, knitting socks, watching Masterchef Australia. I love to cook but this season they seem to be aiming more at restaurant style foods and not stuff I'd whip up at home. Like pigeon with truffles. Instead I made a pot of curried cauliflower soup and have the makings for more pumpkin soup. In winter I live on soup, bread and fruit, usually pears and mandarines. At least the Masterchef trio have allowed desserts into the competition, and there are fewer contestants who have never made pasta/meringue/pastry/mousse as they had last year. Unfortunately the show airs right at the time I would normally be eating my dinner and therefore I am sometimes skimping on my dinner meal in order to watch other people cook.

I've been reading too. Whipped through William Gibson's Idoru, which wasn't as good as the others I have read recently (i.e., Pattern Recognition), and Janet Envanovich's Finger Lickin' Fifteen, which was a hoot as always. I am now in Darwinia by Robert Charles Wilson. Of course, there can't help but be comparisons to the S.M. Stirling change saga but there's a very different tone due to the time when the change took place: 1912 vs 1998.

I spent yesterday driving all over Canberra shopping and today feel like I've been run over by a truck. I bought a granite mortar & pestle (I know--how have I cooked this long without one?) and a rug for the living room to replace the grotty thing in there now. My challenge is how to get the old rug out and the new one in without getting assistance to move furniture. And what will the Imp think of it? I also bought new ceiling light fittings for the lounge and bedroom and ordered a new pendant lamp for the kitchen. I spent a lot of time fruitlessly looking for a new kitchen table. Everyone wants to sell dining room table for 8 and I just want a square or oblong table with simple wooden chairs for my kitchen. It is out there somewhere but I tramped around a lot without finding it.

Thinking about my sister also got me back on the genealogical front, adding details about the maternal line. Ancestry just added a lot of land titles and I found my great grandfather's land grant in Benton, Pennsylvania. I also found out how the exotically named Naomi LaPorte ended up marrying into the Rhone family line: French refugees, which is perhaps where my mother's myth that we were descended from General Lafayette's family arose.

The next 4 weeks are to be spent cleaning out junk. I'll get a skip on Monday and start heaving stuff in it. No time to be sentimental about rusty tools formerly the Bear's. I can't use them and nobody else wants them so out they go.

Swans news: They played horrendously Sat. night against the Pies and lost badly. Somehow we manage to stay in the 8 but playing like that won't keep us there. For the first time I saw Roosy totally lose it at quarter time and give them an earful. They deserved it. Back to watching the other team play and an accasional defensive play. J and I turned off in disgust after our usual round of sms-ings.

Spinning: I wound off 450 m. of plied white alpaca that looks pretty darned spiffy if I do say so. Somebody suggest I try selling it online but I don't know if that is worth the effort. I do seem to be spinning faster than I can knit and I already have a LOT of yarn in the stash. Once I finish the socks currently under construction I can get back to serious knitting. I'm plying another lot of the red I've shown previously and I've plucked from the stash a hamk of SW merino from Laughing Rat Studio in a colourway called house finch: purple brown and blue.

In 4 days it will be July 1 and the third anniversary of his death. It seems like yesterday and yet feels like an eon. I could never have pictured myself living alone and making major decisions about my future by myself. Not having someone smarter than you to bounce ideas off makes me unsure of myself sometimes. I seem to have accepted that my future will be a single one, but there still isn't a day that goes by that I don't wish for him back. "What if" is pointless but and easy game to play. I miss him.