the iCat

Over the last couple of days I've been making the somewhat painful transition into new Mac ownership.   It's really worth it, I think - for me anyway, but don't worry, I'm not going to get all evangelical about it to you.  

The best part is  ... hm, I can't decide. 

Is the best part the huge screen? or the fact that Lily doesn't know where the off switch is?  Back on my greasy old Acer laptop, her favourite place to nestle was on the delightfully soft warm flat keyboard.  And she managed to push some of those buttons; including, more than once, the off switch.  So irritating, to have your computer turned off in the middle of typing.   One time we came home and she'd been sleeping with her nose on the enter key.  She had navigated her way through all the steps to reach this question:  Would you like to delete all the files in this folder, yes or no?  It was the programs folder.  I quickly hit 'No' while Hayden gently lifted her off the computer.

She's not such a fan of this iMac keyboard.  I'm so relieved.

Literary Meme

Katherine, my sewing mentor and bookgroup friend, has tagged me to do a meme.

1.Pick up the nearest book.
2. Open to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people, and acknowledge who tagged you.

OK, here we go:

Madame de Gallardon was in a very spiteful mood because some gentlemen who were with her had thought they should bring up the subject of Oriane: “I’m not in the least anxious to see her, she had replied, I caught sight of her just now, in any case, she’s beginning to age; it seems she can’t come to terms with it. Basin himself says so. And I can well understand that, because, since she’s not intelligent, is a thoroughly nasty piece of work, and has a bad way with her, she certainly feels that, once she’s no longer beautiful, she’ll have nothing left at all.”

It’s a classic piece of Proust bitching. Most of this book, Sodom and Gomorrah consists of aristocratic French people sitting around at dinner parties, at the opera, before the theatre, etc, bitching about each other and who was invited where by whom; who no longer speaks to whom; who is in a secret gay relationship with whom. It sounds like the most boring thing that you could ever read, and I’m sure to some people it is; but I really love it.

I’m not going to blather on any more about Proust – I feel I’ve definitely done enough of that here (but if you want to have a long Proust-loving private chat please phone me up and we can talk for hours). But I do have one more thing to add: if you’re wondering when we’re going to start having children (since we’re married now it seems like everyone wants to know) it’s definitely not going to happen until I’ve read Proust VI. I’ve heard that in the first year of your child’s life it is nigh on impossible to finish reading a single book, and this is one series that I’m not going to read interrupted.

Now, all there's left to do is tag some more people to read to us from their books. I tag Claire and Mr E, Hanna and Drue and Gilbert.

Lily at 11

Last week was Lily's 11th week. Just recently, she's transformed from kitten into fully-fledged miniature cat. Oh, she still does kittenish things like chasing string and playing soccer under the dining table with little screwed-up bits of paper. But now when she sees us watching her she'll stop, get self-conscious and sit up tall and neat.

Here she is in my in-tray, waiting patiently to be attended to.

Wedding

That’s it. We’re married. All the fuss is over.

We had such a wonderful day, and we’re so grateful to everyone who made the trip north to be with us. Thank you.

If you’d like to see more photos of us, you’ll find us all over our official photographer’s website: lizzysawdonphotography.com.au. We can’t believe it’s really us on there.

All Happening

Almost a year and a half since this happened, it's nearly time for Hayden and me to go and get married!

We leave for our Wedding Destination on Thursday, to be ready to greet our small but highly valued group of guests on Friday. By the end of Saturday, we shall be married and on Sunday we'll go straight to our honeymoon on Hinchinbrook Island.

So far, the preparations have gone pretty well - barring my eyebrow crisis of two weeks ago (Me: Can you please make my eyebrows look good for my wedding? Beautician: [peering at me via the scary magnifying mirror] No...No looking good will not be possible for you. Your eyebrows are naturally assymetrical. But come and see me every week up until the day and I might be able to perform a miracle .. of course I cannot promise anything). That aside, I have been very pleased with a couple of last minute additions to our little big event, including an antique cake knife from my Grandma.

Yesterday, however, the brakes of my car decided to pack it in which is really hampering my ability to race crazily all over town for last-minute necessities. I shall have to sit calmly at home and see what I can organise over the phone.

Ms Lily

When we arrived home from New Zealand, those cats were waiting for us at our front door like they had read our flight itinerary. As we took the mother cat and the father cat back across the road to where they are supposed to live, we were already deciding that we would keep one of the kittens. We kept the smaller, fluffier one. We've called her Lily.




Of course, she is already queen of all our house.

Black at the Beach

Sorry if you were wanting to hear me talk about anything other than plants, but well ... I just wanted to show you these black frondy things that gave this gentle beach just south of New Plymouth such a nice old-timey feel. This might sound dumb, but they kind of transported me to a long-ago childhood caravan beach holiday fantasy, and for the first time ever I began to understand why New Zealand's national colour is black. Before this, it seemed much more like a blue and green kind of country to me.

Not Matching

OK, so the garden picture in the last post was mostly by way of an introduction to this one, from another of the special gardens in Hamilton. This one, the Indian Garden, by the way wins Best Small Garden I've Ever Seen 2008.

I didn't mention it in the last post, but also on that day - after our delightful outdoor lunch but before meandering through the Italian Garden - I made Hayden traipse around the shops of Hamilton with me to find a few more key bits and pieces for our wedding.

The unexpected thing I've found with organising this wedding is the number of headaches I've given myself, squinting and turning my head on its side trying to work out if the item I'm holding in the shop matches the outfit I've been carefully and secretly constructing at home. Actually I've found out that I'm not that bad at it (my shoes and bag match perfectly) - but it does require concentration to a degree that often brings on a headache.

That's why I just loved the Indian Garden. I just love the way that there's every different bright colour of flowers growing on top of each other. Indeed, why would the flowers need to match? Completely free non-matching is so much better! What a beautiful relief!

Special Gardens

You know how I really like gardens? (Oh, you didn't know?) Well in Hamilton the botanical gardens, where Hayden and I went after a delightful outdoor lunch at Iguana, have these special sections done up in different styles of the world. This is the Italian one - and as you can see they've put a stack of effort into it.

You can't see it in this picture, but just off to the side there is a fig tree laden with late-summer fruit. I loved it for reminding me of my favourite time in Tuscany, eating figs fresh off the tree after a long hard day in the sun.

Back from NZ

Feeling pretty rusty at blogging, so I think I'm going to do this bit by bit: I'll show you one piccy every day until I'm back in the swing of things.

This shot is from one of my favourite days on our trip: we (Hayden, his sister Kirsten and I) took a little stroll on the base of Mt Taranaki. It was such a beautiful day.

I love it when I get to see new parts of New Zealand. I think I'm going to make a new rule that every time I go there I'll spend at least part of a day on one of their lovely tramping trails.

Absenteeism

Voting. I do enjoy it. Not just the thought of, you know, participating in our great democracy; I really like the actual act of voting. I like going down to our local school on a Saturday morning, waiting in line, putting all the numbers into the little squares and then posting my form into the big cardboard box. It always makes me hungry, so it's great when there's a sausage sizzle afterwards, too.

This week I got to learn a new pleasure: absentee voting, or voting at one's kitchen table. Townsville is electing its new mayor this weekend, but I'll be missing it because we're going to New Zealand. We're going for one last play down on Hayden's family farm, which is being sold on May 1st. I'll be sure to bring back some photos.

X miaow

So we had to give the kittens back to our neighbour. That was the main thing that happened this week. We were due to give them back on Tuesday, a day when I had to start work at the coffee shop at 12 noon. It was raining, all morning, in a very heavy monsoony way, and I was sad all morning because of giving back the kittens, but there was no sign of our Neighbour who was going to come and pick them up.

I remembered how on the night the kittens were born, it was raining then too and our Neighbour didn't want to walk over the road to see them because it was too wet. Instead she came two days later. I didn't want that kind of procrastination to happen again - it was all too sad-making - so when the rain stopped I gave her a call and said "please come and get the kittens now." By the time I'd put the phone down, it was raining hard again.

At last our Neighbour drove her car through the rain over the road to our place, and came in our door carrying a plastic washing basket with a towel in it. She knew where the kittens were, so she went straight to their box and snatched out first one kitten and then the second one and put them in the basket. The kittens' mother came bounding across the room to see what was happening, but she was too late - when she got into the box, the kittens were already gone. She started to make a very low growling noise.

Our Neighbour carried the kittens out of the room, and I leaned down into the box to pick up the mother cat. She didn't even protest, she just hung limply in my arms. It was so sad. I hurried to catch up to our Neighbour, so I could show the mother cat that her kittens were safe in the plastic washing basket. When she saw them, the mother cat jumped straight into the basket with them and began to check them all over for damage.

Then I handed our Neighbour an umbrella and an extra towel to put over the basket to protect the little kittens from the rain. Our Neighbour took the kittens in their basket out our front door and put them in the back seat of her car. Before she drove away she gave me back my old towel, but she didn't give back my umbrella.

More Cats

Well, those two little kittens just keep getting cuter. Meanwhile, their mum has become much more protective of them ... so no more photos of them at this stage.

Mum has also become quite restless. She's bored of being cooped up in our house and I know she just wants to go out to play. Instead she just waits for her man to come and visit her in prison.

Ahh, here he is.

He's a pretty dedicated prison-visitor. He comes every day, and if she doesn't come to the door to see him, he'll sing her a really loooong looooud song.

Update

Well, there's one thing I can update for you:

This cat, who's been hanging around our place for a while now, not discouraged by us and actually allowed to look all over our bedroom, in any draw that takes her fancy:

She's had her kittens! She had two. And even better, she had them at our place, not in a draw but in the box that we had prepared for her with old towels and flannelette sheets.

As I think I mentioned before, we were pretty sure that she was getting close last week, and on Friday when I came home from a meeting (at which I was given more writing work to do - yay!) she was waiting for me at the door. She beat me inside and went straight to her box and waited there very quietly.

I sat down at my computer, but soon decided that I needed to go out and buy some paper and/or get a takeaway coffee before I could get right down to work. I peeked into Kitty's box to tell her that I'd only be gone an hour or so, and I saw that she was having her babies.

Hayden and I are both so stoked that she chose to have her kittens at our place, after weeks and weeks of secret encouragement on our part. I was feeling slightly bad for Kitty's real owner, our neighbour across the road, until we phoned her on Friday and she said that seeing as it was raining she wouldn't come over and meet the new kittens until after work the next day. Eventually when she did come and meet the new kittens, she asked us if we could keep them here for at least a week.

We're really loving having them, and we weigh them on our kitchen scale every day (that's not something their owner asked us to do). It's amazing how they're putting on weight - like 10 - 15 g every day between morning and bedtime. That's 10%, like a person putting on 7kg between leaving for work in the morning and coming home at night!

February Waiting

February in Townsville is hot and hard and slow. There, I’ve said it. I think I’ve said that very sentence twice before. I didn’t want to have to say it this time, but I can't escape it. It’s true.

This year, like the last two years, I’ve been a bit underemployed during February while I wait for the year to get started. It seems like I’m waiting for so many things …

We WERE waiting for news about the job in Singapore, but it turned out that Hayden didn’t get that one. We’re still waiting to hear about a couple of other jobs he's applied for. I won’t say what they are (in case nothing comes of them) but now that Hayden’s decided that it’s time for him to move, I think he'll keep applying for jobs until he finds the right one. You may place a bet, if you like, as to which of these 79 locations that right job turns out to be in. I think Singapore’s still in with a chance, myself.

In the meantime, we’re waiting for it to be time to get married. Preparations for that big day are still ticking along, although nearly everything’s organised now. Recently we booked a photographer (check out her work – very arty and nice, I think) and as part of that we’ll go up to her place in Port Douglas to have an ‘engagement portrait’ shot. I might or might not show you that when it's done. I still haven’t found my second pair of shoes.

And finally, we’re waiting for this cat, our neighbour’s, to have her kittens. Our front balcony is a lovely breezy spot in the afternoons, so this little white cat with the enormous bulging belly quite often joins me there for an afternoon sit. Earlier today, she was resting on my lap and I could actually see the little kittens moving around inside her, underneath her skin. That was pretty cool.

Aussie Day

In between actual Australia Day on Saturday and its public holiday on Monday, I tuckered myself out completely on my first ever mountain-bike ride on a real mountain.

We drove up to the hills of Paluma (just an hour’s drive north from here) to check out what it’s like to go mountain-biking in a World Heritage Listed Wet Tropical Rainforest. And guess what? It was ace! And it was wet. Driving to our biking departure point, I noticed that the grey clouds were swirling dramatically above us; then Hayden began to wonder out loud why all the cars coming towards us were all fogged up inside? And why their windows looked so wet? Up ahead the tropical rain was thundering down in the forest and on the dirt roads, but we didn’t let it stop us. Of course it wasn’t cold, it was warm and muggy as anything, and we weren’t about to wuss out on our first ever expedition.

Once on my bike, I had the best time hurtling down the slippery muddy road and I was not deterred by the heavy rain or the mosquitoes. In my adrenaline-pumped mind I was spending about as much time speeding downhill as I was pushing my way uphill – but when we finally decided to turn around and go back, I realised that my previous perceptions had been seriously out of whack. It was a long way uphill to get back to the car.

I don’t know if you have ever seen mountain bikers on the road, when you’re speeding past on a Sunday drive through the countryside? You wiz by a couple of bikers painfully inching their way uphill and you think “You poor bastards.” Well, I just want to let you know that it’s all completely worth it. All that adrenaline, and all that hardcore exercise makes you feel so tough – but only until the moment you get home, and then you fall to sleep like a baby.

Cool Change

It’s a beautiful day today. Warm, but the humidity’s gone and there is a lovely fresh breeze instead. You have no idea how nice that is, I’m sorry but you really don’t. It’s civilised. It’s such a relief. It’s like the best summer you can imagine, all you people who live in places where you look forward to summer coming each year.

The good thing is that I don’t have much to do today, no work at the café and I’ve heard not a peep out of the guy who was supposed to ring me about some extra writing work, so nothing for me to do but fill my new ipod up with songs, pay my poor potplants some attention, and wait for the Big News that might come later this afternoon.

But what to do in the meantime? Why not make myself an elaborate lunch? When it’s hot and humid, it’s hard enough to eat anything (quite often I just have a chocolate Breaka from the shop across the road and call that lunch) so today I took quite a lot of pleasure in cooking myself up a little something:


Fried up slices of eggplant and mushrooms, later add slices of tomato, and serve the whole lot up on toast with a dash of leftover nachos topping. Delish.


The Big News I mentioned is Hayden’s news – but it affects me, naturally. I might have told you that he applied for a job in Singapore a month or so ago. Finally this week he had an interview, and the word was that they’d get back to him today.

I’m waiting calmly, because my hopes are sort of down about this job. Not that I don’t want to go and live in Singapore, or even that I don’t think that Hayden is up to the job – of course he is! It’s just that we heard a rumour that if they say they’re going to get back to you within a couple of days of the interview, it’s a pretty good indication that they already had someone else lined up for the job.

So what if it’s not to be this time? The good part about that is that we won’t have to move away and then fly back for our wedding in April.

Plenty more jobs in the sea.

Caution: Wedding details discussion ahead

OK girls (boys this is optional for you), I need your help. It’s about shoes. I’m sitting here in my wedding dress - yes, I did find a dress to wear to our wedding, shopping in Brisbane on Christmas Eve, but no you can’t see a picture because we’re doing that thing where the wedding dress is a SECRET. And no it can’t just be a secret from Hayden, it has to be a secret from everyone, because my flippy floaty brain cannot handle any more duplicity than that. A secret that's secret sometimes and not other times? That would be way beyond my information-handling abilities. You know when you’re on the phone to someone, and one of you can talk freely because they’re alone but the other person has to talk in ‘code’ because they might be overheard? Well, in the midst of those kinds of conversations, I always forget which one I am. Am I the one who can talk freely or do I have to talk in code? I just can’t keep that stuff up. But anyway, know this: my secret dress is beautiful, demure, and even better, so much better, it’s not all that uncomfortable.

So what I'm trying to do now is find some shoes that fit the same bill: beautiful, demure, but must must must be comfortable. With a heel. We decided that I would need to wear heels because my bridesmaid, my sister Louisa, is at least 15cm taller than me. When we stood in the dress shop, side by side reflected in the mirror, we looked to be the same height but I had the dress on plus some extremely tall shoes that the sales assistant lent me and in addition I was standing on a box. So it was decided then that I would wear heels and she would wear flats.

I have found a pair of beautiful, comfortable and relatively demure shoes in a shop here in Townsville. They have a smallish heel, just three inches, but that’s enough, don’t you think, for someone who has never in her life spent a whole day wearing heels? But the problem with them is that they don’t really match the dress perfectly. They are comfortable, and beautiful. AND, and here’s the clever part, if I leave the dress floor length and don’t take it up as I had planned, then it will cover up the not-quite-perfect shoes PLUS I’d be relieved of the odious task of finding a dressmaker I can trust. This thing could be double-done, right now, and that would be brilliant for me.

But what do you think? Do you think I should keep searching for the absolute perfect pair of shoes? Or should I be happy with my pretty-good shoes, and get on with more important things like deciding what I'm going to do with my hair?

Do you think done is better than perfect?

Big Wet 08

There's a fair amount of water here in Townsville at the moment. Not as much as Airlie Beach and Proserpine, two towns to the south of us which have been featured on the news but still, it most definitely counts as a Big Wet.

Conversation at the coffee shop where I work has turned from the usual "Hot enough for ya?" to how much water, and where, has come inside your house. So that's a nice change. And, thankfully, I don't have much to contribute to that conversation. So far so good. Now that we're into our third wet season I know just where to check for signs of leakage - especially in that corner of my office where I now know not to keep our passports, birth certificates, attempts at stories, precious old diaries and photos. With any luck we will not be flooded twice!

Surf Sup

You know all those photos I show you of palm trees blue sky and perfect flat calm ocean? Well it really is like that for about ten months of the year here.

But for the other two months, it can get grey and windy and a little bit wild. Cyclone season. Time to be battening down our hatches.

Yesterday I woke up wondering: "What's that crashing sound? Hang on, is it ... surf?". It was strange to think that if it was a surf beach we lived near, we would be hearing that crashing noise all day long.

Later, on our after-dinner stroll, we saw little kids swimming at the beach getting full-on dumped in the waves. Poor little tykes, they didn't have a clue what to do.