From this . . .

As I may have hinted in that last post, I'm pretty chuffed with the new house we've found to live in.

When we first arrived in Bunbury, the company Hayden works for very kindly put us up in this little house in the suburbs while we looked for somewhere permanent to live:  

And at first glance you might think it looks quite nice - it was very clean and quite new.  But after a few weeks there, I was struggling.  I found it claustrophobic, uninspiring, and that aluminium fencing gave off a glare that caused me migraines.  Not nice.

In comparison, our new house - our River House - is beautiful, old, spacious and loaded with character.  The owners have partially renovated it in a very grand style, and the rest of it .. well, it's loaded with character. I'm bursting with pride - and amazement - that it's ours.  For only a small increase in rent, it really is quite an upgrade on our Townsville apartment.   

I'm itching to show you more photos, but first I have to get everything looking right.  In the meantime, I'm off to a meeting that might bring me some freelance writing work.  Wish me luck?

A Little Housewarming

One good thing: we have a little bit of family here.  With Marny here in Bunbury as well, we are a small WA outpost (or pod?) of the Matthew-Reakes.

On Saturday, Marny brought round a civilised feast of local produce and local bubbles to help us celebrate moving in to our new house.

We made a toast, then watched the sun go down from our verandah.  

Nice, eh?

Ten Weeks Ago Today

Hayden's phone rang and we both jumped.  He jumped because he always jumps and scrabbles for his phone if it rings while he's driving, and I jumped because it scares the bejesus out of me when he does that.    

We were on a dry sandy road surrounded by grassy scrub, on our way south from Townsville to Brisbane.  We'd just decided that we weren't going to stop in Gladstone; we didn't want to see another small refinery town.  Hayden fished the ringing phone out of his pocket and handed it to me to answer.  It was Jane, the HR lady from the Bunbury Refinery where we'd flown for his interview the weekend before.  I asked Jane to wait while Hayden found a place to stop and talk.

She was calling for Hayden's referees.  At the end of the call Hayden asked "Just out of curiosity ..." which is how he starts a lot of questions, "how many people is it down to?"  And Jane replied, "Well, usually I wouldn't tell you this, but it's just down to you at this stage."  Hayden stuttered "thank you" and hung up the phone.

We passed the rest of the day in a daze.  We couldn't be sure exactly what the phonecall meant but it seemed likely, though not certain, that Hayden would be offered the job.  Hayden needed to stop driving to process that information, so we decided to go in to Gladstone after all - for some lunch and to talk.  We drove all the way in there and drove around the town and up to Radar Hill to see the view.  We couldn't settle on a place to stop, but we did want some lunch and I wanted to sit together and talk it out ... but he'd suddenly gone super-antsy.  In retrospect it seems clear that all he really wanted was to contact his referees and tell them the good news.  I couldn't pick up on it at the time; I suppose I was overcome with relief.  And hunger.  

Hayden called his old boss Josh while we were waiting at a sandwich bar, and then we walked over the road to the Gladstone Library for him to email his other referee Elaine - he didn't know where in the world she was at that moment.  I remember he marched right past the Information Desk to where the computers were.  He just needed to get onto a computer.  I called him back and he signed in correctly with the librarian, and he was very apologetic and charming, but I could tell he'd been blind to her completely.  He just needed to get to that computer.

I'd forgotten that day until yesterday when I walked in the door of the Bunbury library and it seemed immediately similar.  And neither of them is much different to the one back in Townsville.  They're all big new buildings housing little collections, with internet computers in use all day long.  In the foyer of the Gladstone library, where I waited for Hayden that day, I noticed they were having a charity sale of old jigsaw puzzles.  I like puzzles, and I like to do something charitable when it suits me, so I spent quite a long time trying to choose just one or two; they were a bargain at 50c each.  Then I suddenly put them all down when I realised that it was going to be a long time until I could go home and spread out a puzzle - wherever and whenever that home was going to be. 

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that for all the big change and upheaval of the past three months, we've very nearly settled back down again - in another small refinery town on the coast.  Ok, so we're on a different coast now - Bunbury's on the west coast of Australia, south of Perth - but there is a lot here that feels the same.  There's good and bad in that.  

Hopefully over the coming weeks I'll start to unravel more of the good.  With more photos, I promise.

The Best

We had a wonderful time in New Zealand

Such a beautiful, restful, damp and arty place.  

Sadly we have to say goodbye ... 

goodbye for now.

Killer Fluffy

Our Lily is afraid of sheep.  She HATES them.

Yes, our cat has come with us to New Zealand.  We probably wouldn't have put her through the trauma of travelling if we'd known that we were only going to stay for a month, but she's been a real trooper with all the changes.  She's OK with the cold and rain here - only she does sometimes wake us up ridiculously early needing to be let outside, only to come skulking back in a very short time later.  She then burrows back into the bed with us - fur and paws all damp and cold.  She's become an exemplary snuggler and a champion heater-hogger.

The only time I've seen her really up in arms was today when our neighbourhood sheep moved into a paddock really close to our house.  Lil glimpsed them through the fence and got scared; she let out a low moan like wind through an old farmhouse and scampered quickly up onto the microwave.  Obviously we shouldn't let her do that, but (a) none of her training seems to have come with her from Townsville and (b) she's got to have at least one high safe place from where she can keep an eye on those woolly bastards next door.  I don't know what she thinks they might do to her.

Life in the Shadow of a Mountain

This morning we had to crack open the car - it was frozen shut and the windscreen was completely frosted up with beautiful feathery swirls of ice. Sitting inside the frosted up car was strangely cosy, and then as the ice melted and we were able to drive away, we came into some beautiful views of the mountain all covered in delicious-looking icecreamy snow. We've come to Taranaki - on the western side of New Zealand's North Island - for Hayden to start work with an organic cheese factory that's being built by a stream. Sounds idyllic, doesn't it? And it is. It's just beautiful. Freezing, literally. But beautiful. It's everything you would imagine life in New Zealand to be.

We're staying in a little wooden cottage with no mobile coverage and no internet (I'm typing this at the local library 15km down the road). It has rained ferociously. Geese and sheep are our closest neighbours. I'm wearing more layers of clothing than ever before: thermal socks and jumpers, woolly hats and scarves and gloves. It's quite a contrast to Townsville where I thought winter might be coming when I put an extra sheet on the bed to 'rug up' in the morning.

It is beautiful here ... but this is not the end of the story. We might not be staying long, and it is looking likely that Bunbury in Western Australia will win out in the end. In a couple of weeks we will be back across the Tasman, back all the way across Australia and as far as we know, that will be our final stop. But in the meantime we're enjoying the beautiful green grass - it's flourescent, really - the fresh clear water that comes straight out of the tap and the family and friends who are all around us here. Bunbury seems a long, long way away.

Goodbyeeeeee

Finally, something's changed.  We've packed up our house and our car, and we're heading off on a new road.

We weren't sure that this was ever going to happen.  Right down to the last minute, the plan kept changing:  there were phonecalls about jobs that Hayden had given up on, last minute interview trips to Melbourne and Western Australia (sorry Melbourne friends, we were there so briefly we didn't have time to see everybody - so we decided to be fair and see nobody while we were there.)  

In fact, the plan is not even settled yet:  we are not yet sure of our final destination.  Tomorrow we set off from Townsville for the last time; by the time we arrive in Brisbane (we're going to take four days to drive there) we'll know whether we're headed for New Plymouth in New Zealand or Bunbury in Western Australia.  

Keep you posted.

On the Job Front

Recently I have been thinking that it is a bit of a shame, really, not to be documenting this phase of our lives more closely. I mean, it might be helpful, or useful, or even interesting for other people to hear a little bit about what it's been like for us to be participating in this global thing that's going on right now. This Global Recession.

Hayden can show his side, what it's like to be a clever, talented and career-driven person who at any normal time would have to beat job offers away with a stick. He's an extremely employable person - an engineer with an MBA for goodness sake - who in recent times has gotten to know that ashy taste of disappointment when the HR people don't call back: it means rejection on the job front.

Seems like everyone in the job market is ready to accept the kind of work they were doing five years ago and we can count the number of times Hayden has held the big crumb of a job opportunity in his hands only to have some wily old eagle, who was doing that job five years ago, swoop down and snatch it from his grasp. Hayden is waiting to get the chance to become that swooping eagle himself. It may come yet. And then he'd have that crumb of a job he was doing five years ago, with its reduced pay and stripped out benefits, all its comforts gone. But, you know, it would still be a job.

It is tricky being on the sidelines of this one. I'm doing everything I can think of to stay supportive and patient, including trying to earn enough for our weekly expenses on my reduced hours at the coffee shop. (Why did they reduce my hours? I don't know. Feels like spite). We're both staying positive, we're kind to each other and we support some of the crazy efforts of friends who find themselves in a similar position. (Check out this old mate of mine Demis, who built a website to showcase his special wares. He's offering some real bargains on there: http://www.ijustwantyourmoney.com/).

And, of course, we don't want to be whingers. We don't want to be putting a negative vibe out there, and it's our instinct to close ranks and protect ourselves when we're going through a tough time. So I don't expect I'll be talking much in the future about what's going on around here ~ not until we have some good news to tell. But I thought that I would give you a little glimpse of what it's been like. For us, anyway.

Um, hello

There's just not a lot I can talk about in public at the moment.   But we're plugging away - Hayden's applying for jobs with all his might, and I'm making coffees each day like you wouldn't believe.

I have found a bit of time to get back in the garden, though.  After months away from it during our monster Wet Season, I've recently discovered that not all our plants are completely dead.  Some have gone.  A couple have thrived on all that water, but most are just looking a bit straggly and stressed.   But the thing about caring for plants is that if you get their situation right -  just enough water, just enough sun - they do grow beautifully, all on their own.  Sometimes it takes a while to find that right position, but once you do you can rely on them - they usually come good.

What happened THIS week

We have had to do a fair bit of adjusting recently, and this week I got to do just a little bit more.  This week I changed employers.  I didn't change jobs, rather my job changed around me.  Of course the first rule of blogging is: don't talk about work.  But work is all I've been doing recently, so talk about it I will.

For the last couple of weeks I've been working full time at the coffee shop, not out of a conscious choice so much as out of my panicked reaction to our current circumstances combined with the shop owner's need to cover all the shifts.  He's come to be part friend/part boss over the past two years, and he said it would really help him out if I could bump up my shifts from two days a week to five.  Just for a while.  Me, I'm not usually able to refuse a request for help.  And I was happy to do it because I loved his coffee shop; it was the first place we went in Townsville where we really felt at home and happy to just hang out.  I really wanted the place to survive, and to do well.  The boss said that a new staff member would join us soon.  He said maybe next week.  Then he said maybe the week after that.

Well.  On Thursday my co-worker and I got the news that our boss was no longer our boss, and that another bigger and much more professional outfit had taken over our tiny coffee operation.  They told us that they were keen to 'minimise any disruption' and that it would really help them out if we would stay on in our jobs.  In that moment it sounded like an OK idea, so I agreed.

But after two days under this new arrangement, my head is still spinning.  It's the same job - the same coffee, the same regulars with the same orders, the same mini-conversation over and over again throughout the day.  But the background noise is completely different.  I'm no longer working to help a friend out, doing everything I can to build our base of happy customers and to keep the whole thing afloat.  For him I worked super-hard, because if his business went under we would lose one of the mainstays of our life in Townsville.  If you are not a coffee drinker, you might wonder how a single coffee shop could have that much bearing on a life.  But just imagine we're in Casablanca.  This coffee shop was our Rick's.  So now we're still in Rick's Cafe, but it's been taken over by his greasy competitor from the Blue Parrot.  Ugh.

It's just a job to me now.   

Valentine's Day Lunch

Obviously ~ to have love, life, food and shelter is to be lucky.  Especially now; especially in Australia.

But I know that I am really lucky.  

Today, for Valentines Day, Hayden recreated our legendary first picnic together: Summer 2004, Moonlight Cinema, Melbourne botanical gardens.  As he spread the picnic blanket with wine and food he'd spent the day preparing, Hayden asked me: "You're not vegetarian are you?" And I could see all the trouble he'd gone to and answered: (gulp) "... no, of course not."  And it wasn't a lie; from that point on I really was an omnivore.   Today's menu is one of my favourites:  roast chicken stuffed with semi-dried tomatoes, rocket leaves and cous cous salad.  This time, though, it was an indoor picnic as the ground outside is still completely wet and muddy.

Obviously ~ there are ups and downs.  Things happen to us, and other things fail to happen, and the circumstances test us.  We might just now, Hayden and I, be getting a sense of all the things that can happen during a marriage, and how it will last and bounce back and carry on, always growing stronger.  

I'm wishing you a happy Valentine, too.

40 Days and Nights

The newspaper tells us that this has been going on for forty days and nights, but I don't know if that's true.

I can't remember how long it has been raining or what it was like before - all I know is that some time ago things changed: the sun disappeared. the air cooled. Hayden stopped going to work every day and I started. He's been writing letters and emailing, applying, working full time at finding a job. Meanwhile I am making coffees all day long, and in my dreams at night I'm still making coffees. Two nights ago Lily jumped up by my side of the bed and asked me for a medium mocha. That was plain ridiculous; she knows she can't have chocolate.

Wherever you are in Australia - the cool part drowning in puddles or the hot part dry and fireswept - I hope you're going OK. We are. We're plodding along through our new muddy puddles. We are going OK.

We'll be fine.

So how are you?  I mean really?

We, I mean Hayden and I, we're fine.  We really are.  But I won't lie to you: we're not completely fine.

Until recently, the world's financial troubles were merely theory to us.  Due to, well, due mainly to apathy and procrastination, we didn't have much invested and we didn't lose much when the stock market went down.  We always said we'd invest ... later.  I actually felt pretty smug and safe cos we'd just chucked all our money in the bank.  And it was fine.

But we watched the news.  We had a feeling that things were going to change, and there were rumours going around at Hayden's work.  We thought they might announce some big changes on January 21 - the day of Obama's inauguration.   The company could prepare itself, knowing there would be a lot of attention on the goings on in Washington.  They could be pretty sure they would be the second story on the news that night.

So, last Wednesday, January 21, Hayden was called to a meeting.   The company announced their changes, and Hayden lost his job along with 102 of his colleagues.  In the same cut, our friends in Perth lost their jobs too when a whole mine was closed.  

But we'll be fine.  We'll be fine.  I keep saying it like a mantra, to myself mostly.  We'll have four or five months (longer if we're thrifty) in which to re-settle ourselves ... But we can't imagine where that might be.  In the meantime, Hayden's settling into a new routine and he's taken over my sewing table for his temporary home office.  And it is nice having him home with me during the day.

Rainy Days

Once again, the rain has come to Townsville.  This is a good and a bad thing.

The downside is that we've had so much rain that it's started coming inside.  It wells up through little cracks between the walls and the floor, just at the most inconvenient spots.  One spot, under my desk, was just where I kept the old cardboard box filled with little scraps of paper on which were written ideas for blogs and stories, lists of goals and dreams and half-formed characters.  I was going to use all of those one day.  The other spot was just where I stored the backup machine for my computer.   Thank you, rainwater.  Spot on as always.

But I love the cosiness of rainy days at home.  Sitting, staring at the water coming down.  Daydreaming of times past in distant rainy cities.  Hanging out with my Christmas presents.  I got an amazing haul of presents this year - didn't you?  My sister gave us the jigsaw puzzle in the photo, which Lily and I have been working on for a couple of days.  I got a beautiful grey handmade shoulder bag from Kirsten.  A special writing pen from Hayden, and a new coffee cup with a lid for keeping the coffee warmer for longer as it sits at my bedside.  And so many other beautiful things.  

My parents gave me a voucher for their favourite independent bookshop in Brisbane.  A book voucher is highly prized in my family; we're agreed that choosing the book is at least half the fun.  Last Friday Hayden and I stopped in and found that it's a factual, learned sort of bookshop with beautiful books on design, gardening, foreign languages and all sorts of academical stuff.  And it's also got the best little section on writing.   I chose this book, Bird by Bird, and I highly recommend it to anyone who's looking for some gentle, funny and helpful advice on writing.  Whether or not you take it is, of course, up to you.

The wedding of Paul and Millicent

Paul and Millicent were married atop a hill in northern New South Wales.  

(Hayden took all these photos.)

In a nice twist on the usual ceremony, the whole crowd got to pronounce them husband and wife, and we all yelled together "You may now kiss the bride!"

Later there was feasting and dancing, and quite a lot of drinking.  

(I mention the drinking only because my biggest contribution to the day was to assist my parents bottling twelve dozen long-neck beers, which many of the guys carried around and drank from as if they were stubbies).   

It was grand.

Hanging Patchwork

I showed you this 'dappled shade' patchwork before, when I first made it as a picnic blanket.   I originally thought of it as a present for my brother Paul and his fiancee Millicent, who are getting married this Saturday down in the cool ranges of northern New South Wales.  Like ours was, their wedding will be a full-weekend affair - the best for family weddings I reckon - but unlike ours it sounds like theirs will double as a mini music festival.  I can't wait!

My inspiration for the patchwork was a backyard picnic we had at their place when we visited last July.  We got the family together with a bottle of champagne to toast Paul's brand new self-designed-self-built chook house.  Paul was pretty chuffed with his new structure and he hoped to enter it into an architectural competition as a small free-standing building.  He is not shy of big ideas, my brother.

After that, I wanted to contribute something to their future backyard entertaining and I thought a new picnic blanket would do the trick.  I wanted to recreate the setting -  their cosy, wooden, plant-filled house in Dutton Park.  Sort of old and dark and pleasantly connected with the leafy close surrounding trees, with back stairs down to a classic inner-city Brisbane backyard - long and grassy and stretching away downhill.   I wanted to include a little of the muck of the chook house and the view we had from the backyard up into the earthy, undeveloped space under their house (Brisbane folk know what I'm talking about).  There are brighter greens there too, mainly for Millicent who I think is going to add a dash of dramatic style to our family.

But do you know where you DON'T need a patch of dappled shade?  Sitting in your shady back yard under a beautiful tree.  That first bunch of photos I took told me that.  Where you most want to be reminded of dappled shade is in your bright white lounge room in the middle of a Townsville summer.   Our window faces east, and on the hottest mornings through the hottest months it lets in the most disgustingly harsh bright light, and heat that sets our place to bake for the rest of the day.  A while ago I covered it with the 'dappled shade' blanket, and it does the trick completely.  (Yes, perhaps wooden shutters outside would also work well, but so far our landlord is saying No to that.)  Now the blanket's a fixture and I can't imagine taking it down before the weather turns nice again in April.  Sorry guys.  

But don't worry, we did get you another wedding present.

Happy New Year!

I am starting off this fresh new year in a cleaning and organising frenzy.   I have already worked out my new year's resolution - I just make one and keep it each year, I don't piss around with lists of impossible tasks - and I might share it here later.

In the meantime, I hope you had a fun new year's eve, and I wish you all the best for 2009.  Thanks for clicking on my blog this year!

xx

Naomi

Looking Nothing At All Like Christmas

You know, hot Christmas is beginning to be a problem.  And I think it's getting worse.

Each year I add more crafty blogs to my link list, and each year I get new ideas from them for Christmas preparation - the cooking, gifts you make rather than buy, and of course the decorations for your home.  I love all that stuff and I come away feeling full of inspiration, but I find that I have nowhere to direct it.  These Christmas-crafty people seem mostly to live in the northern hemisphere, where they make hearty meals and big fruit cakes, cosy soft decorations and generally create warmth and bright to banish the cold and dark outside.

We in Townsville get more than enough warmth and bright from the sun each day, and what we need most of all is to not manufacture any more of it.  This causes a problem with the Christmas decorations.   Our shops, of course, go nuts with the tinsel and the songs about sleigh bells, and there's enough of an ick factor there - hot and flustered car parking, shops overrun with bogans and really too many bodgy tattoos on display - to put me off entirely.  (The other day I had to get Hayden to drive us home from the pool a different way, avoiding the Christmas Carols in the park, because I couldn't look at another insufficiently-dressed inked-up person - man or woman - climbing down from the family 4WD.)  When I get home, I need to be cool and calm.  Instantly.

I did manage a bit of Christmas crafting in the end.  I really liked this idea from Posy Gets Cosy for a quilted table runner ~ quilted, of course, to hold groaning platters of hot roasted meats and big casserole dishes of vegetables.  But instead of using warm Christmassy red and green, I stuck to coolish blues and pistachio.  And I quilted it only very lightly - more to stop condensation rings than scorch marks on the table.  

So, OK, it doesn't look very Christmassy.  Don't think of hot roast turkey.  Think of the cool and delicious glass of golden sauvignon blanc I'm enjoying right now because my Christmas decorating is done.  

Hair Disaster

I'm so irritated right now.

I was at the hairdresser's, right, which is in the middle of one of those disgustingly large shopping malls.  I'd just sat down in front of the mirror and was leafing through an old copy of Australian Hair, they hadn't put the black cape around me or anything, when an alarm starts going off and we're instructed to evacuate the building.  Hmph.  The hairdressers promptly close their front door and usher all us customers out through the back into the carpark.  The comical part was how they kept cutting hair all the while, and finished off a couple of cuts while we were standing around waiting in the sun.  The less funny part was how everyone - the hairdressers naturally, all the other customers and Christmas shoppers and staff of other shops, everyone except me - all lit up a cigarette at exactly the same time.  I'm sure even the children were smoking while we were all standing there squinting and sweating.  It was disgusting. 

 

I really wanted my hair cut, and I really didn't want to hike back to my car which was of course parked on the other side of the mall.  But how long could I put up with that second hand smoke?  No-one was offering to do my hair out there, but I waited and waited until finally the chief hairdresser told all the other hairdressers that they could go home.  As we were standing in their staff carpark, they all just hopped into their tiny cars and sped off out of there.  Ugh.  I was left to begin my circumnavigation of the enormous building, and I got crankier and crankier with each hot step.  I could feel my skin burning in the sun.  I tried to take a short-cut through the covered part of the carpark but I was told by an official that that was forbidden.  It was a bomb threat, and it had to be taken seriously.

I'm home now, but I'm still cranky.  If I ever find out who phoned in that bomb threat, well, I'm going to ...well, I don't know.  But I'll think of something.

Flying Home

Don't you love the little guys on these placemats?  I found them in our 'special things' cupboard, and I believe they once belonged to Hayden's Grandma.  They're different birds of New Zealand including, of course, the kiwi (that's the New Zealand Little Spotted Kiwi in the middle there).  This year it's Hayden's turn to have Christmas at home, and we'll be flying to New Zealand - just for a week - on December 23.   I wonder if there will be space on the Christmas table for them?

I am a bit sad to be missing Christmas in Brisbane with my half of the family, but I have to say that Christmas in New Zealand is pretty good too.  For one thing, it's often cool enough to enjoy a big warm lunch on Christmas day.  And for another thing, well, our last Christmas trip there did turn out to be really, really good.