Beach flowers

We're so busy hanging out near the river and the estuary that we often forget to go to the beach. There's a lot of water around here, OK? We can't get to all of it, all of the time.

I was forced to hang out there one morning recently, though, while Hayden completed at 10k "fun" run along the esplanade and I got completely carried away by the colours of the beachside flowers. I'd never seen anything like it. WA is nuts for flowers in springtime. There are more pics on my flickr page ... click on the photo and it will take you there.

Coffee love notes

Hayden makes me coffee every morning. You probably already knew that - it's one of our Things. We nearly wrote it into our wedding vows ... but stopped short and instead Hayden promised, in writing which he gave me on our wedding night, that he will always make me coffee in the morning.

And he has kept his promise extremely faithfully (he only forgot one time), but when we first arrived in Bunbury we found that we had a problem. I would get up early with Hayden and he would make me coffee, and then he'd leave for work at 6:30am which in July was in complete darkness. So then I would be wide awake full of coffee beans, with a long day stretching before me filled with nothing. After all the fun we had in New Zealand, life in Bunbury was depressing.

Hayden's lovely solution was to let me sleep in a bit longer each day while he crept about in silence and darkness getting ready for work. He would then prepare the coffee and leave it sitting on the stove all ready to cook. I would wake up later to a lovely coffee, topped off with a note from Hayden, carefully written and tucked into the top of the coffee maker. Not quite as nice as spending the morning together, but better on the whole for me during that difficult time.

These days things are much better. It's lighter in the mornings for one thing and my days are much happier, so I often make it up in the morning to have breakfast with Hayden (plus we live much closer to his work now, so he leaves later). We have solved our little problems one by one and we are now quite contentedly taking each Spring day at a time. I have decided to stop trying to tell myself (and you) that we have 'settled in' here in Bunbury because truthfully we don't feel that we want to stay here long. But you never know, that might later change.

This morning I was cleaning up near the stove and I noticed that the pile of morning coffee notes has grown quite tall! I feel a bit silly keeping them, but they remind me how each day has lead to the next, and the next, and how we've walked our way out of the darkness.

Lavender

I keep harvesting this stuff from the garden. I have no idea what to do with it.

Any suggestions?

Walk along the estuary

Earlier this the week, Hayden and I took an afternoon stroll along Leschenault Inlet, the long tidal stretch of water known locally as 'the estuary'. It's a great place for watching pelicans and other waterbirds, and spotting kangaroos and the occasional dolphin. The dolphins come in to the estuary when the ocean outside gets too rough.

Though we won't get daylight saving here (WA decided against it last year) the days are getting longer and warmer, and the afternoons are saturated in sunset colours. I'm finally feeling like we're starting to settle in.

At the End of the Day

At the end of a day of gardening I still have a sharp hill to climb back up to the house.

Welcome to the funny back half of our place. Below this big rock wall, our backyard slopes quickly downhill to two ugly sheds - one of them enormous as well as ugly - plus our veggie garden and fruit trees. It's a funny old place, but the more sunny days I spend in the veggie garden the more I like it. It's been a good while since I've lived in a place with a back yard. Back in Townsville, our backyard was the communal pool and carpark. Before that in Melbourne our back yard was ...Toorak Road?

Even the big rock wall is growing on me, now that there are more things growing on it. It has daisies busting out of every cranny. Actually, we have a lot to thank this wall for: the house was available for rent for months before we moved into it, a lot of families rejecting it because of the dangerous drop in the backyard. Then the price decreased by $100 a week and it fell nicely down into our price-range. Thank you dangerous drop!

River duck