Merry Xmas

It's nearly time for us to go and get on the plane back to Brisbane, for Christmas with my family and a bonus - surprise! - family wedding.

I hope you have a wonderful, lively, happy, funny and entertaining Christmas and New Year. I'll be back here in Bunbury in the New Year, and I'll be back to blogging ... I don't know when.

Blogging is a funny thing. Sometimes it fits right into your life and provides an outlet and a means of communicating thoughts that would otherwise not get an airing. Back in Townsville I seemed to have a fair number of such thoughts. Here in WA, for whatever reason, I don't seem to have so many.

Either way, it's probably time to end this blog called A Town and a Half. But if I start up something new, I'll definitely let you know.

X

Naomi

Redback Spider

Redback 1, originally uploaded by &Naomi.

I had never seen one of these in the flesh before, so I was very surprised when this one appeared out of the old cardboard box I was carrying out of the garage. Promptly dropped the box, squealed and ran inside.

A little bit later, I got up the courage to go outside again, to take a photo and to see if he was alive or dead. Turns out he was alive!

But not for long.

Strawberries

Strawberries, originally uploaded by &Naomi.

Apricot Harvest

Apricot Harvest 3, originally uploaded by &Naomi.

More Space

The Lil, originally uploaded by &Naomi.

Western Australia is an enormous place. Perth often describes itself as the most remote city in the world; for all I know that might even be true. As I rode along the river path yesterday, I wondered to myself why that didn't make our life here feel more like an adventure. Back in '06, when I was temporarily working at that minesite, I just loved the wide open space and I was exhilarated at the thought that there was nearly nothing between me and the big brown central part of Australia. Why does a similar thought now make me feel so sad and lonely?

I know that we are lucky to be here. Hayden is lucky (along with being talented and clever and extremely hardworking) to have found a job so soon after getting made redundant. We are lucky to be fit and healthy. I am lucky enough to be studying something I really enjoy. We're living in an enormous house (well, enormous for us. It's considered averagely poky in WA). That's lucky, isn't it? But knowing you're lucky is not the same as feeling it.

We have more space here than we know what to do with, but what I recently realised was that the space we make use of in this house every day is roughly the size of our flat in Townsville. What I want to try to do over the summer is to spread our life out a bit. I want us to relax and take in the big space that's all around us. To try to love it and live it, rather than being intimidated by it. I'm going to re-arrange our house a bit, to make better use of all these extra rooms we've got. I'm expanding the garden. And I'm going for bigger space around my blog photos and words.

Do you think it'll do the trick?

The Estuary

The Estuary, originally uploaded by &Naomi.

On Monday, Marny and I went kayaking on the Estuary. It was not as calm as it looks in this picture - it was quite windy, with swirling clouds in the sky. But it wasn't cold at all so we decided not to be daunted.

Each in a long red kayak, we paddled out across the water in the direction of the setting sun. Even though the wind was coming quite strong from the side, we made it nearly to the cutting that leads out to the open sea. Marny was all for going through the cutting, but I was really battling the wind, and I got scared that instead of paddling into the channel, I would just smack right up against the rocks at its mouth. I really didn't want to smack up Marny's beautiful second kayak. We agreed to turn around.

On the way back, we took it easier, and let the wind and tide drift us gently around to leeward. It was a long, circuitous route home around the edge of the big estuary. The sun was really going down now, turning the clouds a beautiful swirly grey. As we'd let ourselves drift quite a bit, the home stretch was long and dead into the wind, all the way back to Marny's house in the dark. By the end, I was tired - but good tired. Pretty good exercise for a Monday night, I thought.

My arms were stiff and sore for the next couple of days. And my tennis lesson on Wednesday night was horrible. I was in no position to start learning to serve. But I'm feeling much better now. Hopefully we'll go out paddling again on the weekend.

101109

101109, originally uploaded by &Naomi.

What a lovely birthday! I got completely spoilt with presents, lots of lovely messages from friends and family all over the world, a fancy dinner on the town, and as you can see, cake (pity I didn't manage to take the photo before there were a couple of bites taken out).

I also squeezed in time for a bit of reflection on what has been a big and eventful year. I'm not sure of the exact dates, but I think that it was around this time last year that we heard that things were not going to go the way we thought with Hayden and his old job in Townsville. We started wondering then what the future would hold, but I don't think I would ever have predicted Hayden spending time not working, a couple of fun freezing months in New Zealand, then washing up on the other side of Australia and taking up studying again.

Though I'm still feeling a bit mixed about our move to Bunbury (has that been coming through at all?) there are some wonderful things about it. We've been hanging out heaps with Hayden's cousin Marny; we're trying out living in a big old house in the suburbs; and the study I'm doing (Master of Arts (Writing) at Swinburne) is really very enjoyable. If only studying could stop being an expensive hobby and start being a paying job ... well, if I was going to turn this into an opportunity for making some kind of resolution or goal, I think it would have to be something like that.

What, more flowers?

I made a little promise to myself (and to you) that in between every post about flowers, I would talk about something else. But that was before I logged in and saw the post below, from when I was watching the flowers instead of the fun run. That's just what I do around here - I look at flowers instead of any other thing I'm meant to be doing.

Sorry.

These flowers are different as they are out in the country. Today, Hayden and I travelled out for a delightful lunch at Taste of Balingup (it's a foodie place ... much as I hate the term, I'm slowly coming to admit that it applies to us. Turns out we will travel 70km each way for a fresh fruit juice and salad). Then afterwards had a good stroll around the lavender gardens nearby.

We hadn't been back out that way since August, when all the apple trees were bare. Now they too are covered in ... flowers. It's inescapable, I tell you. The flowers are taking over.

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

Warm Spring Weekend

This weekend was a big one. On Saturday morning we bid our final goodbyes to Hayden's Grandma Ellie. Though we wished we could have been at the funeral in Palmerston North with the rest of the family, we saw that she had a good send-off via webcam. Who said that technology was impersonal? We felt like we were really there. We sobbed along, and laughed along, with everyone else. It was a really nice goodbye.

The rest of the weekend we spent in gentle celebration of spring, and of life. I worked in the veggie garden, planted spring onions, potatoes, lettuce and basil. Hayden took me for a ride on our tandem bike, all up and down the other side of the river. We walked along the beach together. We spread the weekend papers out in the sun and read a bit ... dozed a bit. It was good to feel so warm.

Good Beans

Coffee drinking just got even more serious at our place.

Hayden got hold of some green beans (ordered off the internet, where else) so he could try his hand at roasting them himself.

Because he wanted to make it a proper trial, he compared his beans to all the other kinds that we currently have in the house (from L to R): Javan, Nuiginian, East Timorese and Indian. Have you had coffee from India recently? It's one of my new all-time favourites.

Hayden's green beans were from Ipanema (you know, like the girl in the song).

Marny and I watched on while Hayden swirled the beans around on the stove in one of our old frying pans. He gave them a nice dark roast and the smell that came out was absolutely nose-tingling. The beans cracked and glistened, just like the proper ones from the shops!

And the taste?

Delicious!

Just add Juleps

Mint supply 2, originally uploaded by &Naomi.

So most of our veggie garden is languishing in the 'ideas' stage, but the herb section is going nuts. Look at our mint! Perhaps it's not surprising that the mint has spread out a bit over the last couple of weeks - good rain, spring coming, mint being mint and all that - but I can't help willing it to come on even further. I'm fantasizing mostly of ripping out big handfuls of the stuff to mix into our summer drinks.

Spring

Spring 3, originally uploaded by Town and a Half.

It's here!

Living Room

Living Room, originally uploaded by Town and a Half.

Oolong Tea

PICT0035, originally uploaded by Town and a Half.

This time around, I'm trying to be a calmer student. Instead of coffee around the clock, I'm going for Oolong tea.