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.

Studying

I've started a course! I'm studying writing - long distance of course, from my laptop out on our sunny verandah.

I'm really enjoying it. The format for contributing my responses to tutorial questions online is a lot like blogging, so no great stretch so far.

But can you imagine blogging - and then getting a mark at the end of semester? Hmm maybe it's time to knuckle down?

The Munda Biddi Trail

Opportunities for outdoor exercise are everywhere around here. Hayden is, of course, planning to be part of the Ironman (big triathlon) down the road in Bussleton in December, so recently he has been ramping up his training and we've been out to explore some of the local trails - together.

The Munda Biddi Trail is an enormous mountainbike trail which starts just north of Perth, passes us by in Bunbury and carries on down to Albany on the south coast of Australia. The whole trail is off-road, running mainly through tall eucalypt forest. The Bibbulmun Track is a similarly huge hiking track, on which hikers spend days walking and nights camped in tin sheds. Both of these enormous tracks conveniently criss-cross just a short distance from the door of Hayden's office. I picked him up from work this afternoon with my bike in the back and we gave the Munda Biddi Trail a bit of a go.

The trail is commodious - built for groups of mountainbikers to ride together - so it's perfect for my favourite kind of exercise with Hayden: the Run-Ride. On a Run-Ride, Hayden runs on foot while I pedal effortlessly alongside him on the bike. It does look a bit sadistic when we're going along, and I get lots of comments from people we pass by (including the old 'whip-crack' sound), but really it's a brilliant piece of solutioneering. I could never keep up with Hayden if I was on foot and he would never get enough training in if he slowed down to walk with me. On a run-ride, however, I get a nice long easy ride though the forest while Hayden sweats, working hard beside me for a couple of hours. Also, I get to do most of the talking. If Hayden is really training hard he'll be too puffed to interrupt.

Land of Apples

Yesterday, we took the road to Manjimup via Dardenup and Marrylup and arrived in Balingup. I now know that what I thought was one town called "blah-blah-something-up" is at least three or four different towns. This is the region to the south-east of us, where apples are grown.

The trees are all bare now, and silverly eerily beautiful.

And the empty crates stack up to make an interesting temporary wall for the packing shed.

When we first visited Bunbury in May, it was the end of summer and we bought a couple of apples from a farmer's market. They were so crunchy fresh and sweet that they made it into the 'pro' column when we were making up our minds about moving here. It's nice to know that the apples were super-local. And I'm definitely coming back for more, straight from the source.

Study

This is my study. The light was coming into it so nicely this morning (it's our first proper sunny day in ages), that I wanted to take a snap. I thought my desk looked a bit like a still-life - complete with a piece of fruit, my morning mandarine. You might need to click on the image to see what I'm talking about.

Those white shelves in the sunlight are part of the set that I got on our Ikea trip. I know they look a bit bare, but my idea is that I'll fill them up with little objects that inspire me. Standing behind the desk are two more Ikea bookcases, waiting to become my reference library.

Curtains

Sometimes I wonder, as I think other educated creative and crafty bloggers do, whether our foremothers really fought for liberation in the 1960s just so I could stay home day after day and worry about curtains?

When we rented this house, we were promised curtains for the front living room. Today, after days and days of nagging phonecalls, they were finally delivered and I was so relieved that I nearly skipped out the door to my yoga class. During the class - I know you're only meant to think about yoga during yoga class, but anyway - I thought about how sometimes when a tiny issue gets stuck or snagged, I really let it get to me out of all proportion.

Does that ever happen to you?

Not Nearly Enough

Outside today it's wet and windy and the water in the river is being whipped into little whitecaps. 

I wish it were warmer. I'm stiff and tired today after a long day yesterday shopping in Perth (I know, tough for some).  I'm wishing for some easy work, like washing all the sheets and towels and putting them out to dry in the sun. Such an easy, simple, satisfying job.

But I don't have nearly enough sunlight.  All I've got is this tiny square: the lemons I picked from the backyard tree a couple of days ago.

Time, do you think?

Something about this blog seems wrong. Is it the name up there in the header? And maybe the image too? Think maybe it's time for an update?

Drue asked me a while ago if I would change the name A Town and a Half now that I've left Townsville. I agree it makes sense ... but what to change it to? Nothing's jumping out at me. To be blunt, nothing in the whole of Bunbury is jumping out at me. Compared to Townsville it seems safe and quiet. We've left the North's outlandish edge. It's nice here. It's nearly sedate.

And the colours are different - have you noticed in the photos? Where Townsville is a clashing kaleidoscope: blue sky, aqua sea, red rock, and a jungle of overgrowing plantlife, the landscape around Bunbury is muted. It's flat browns and dull greens. It's beautiful too - in a slow, more restful way. In Townsville I was overwhelmed with excess colour. Here I love our wide brown river, with no crocs, and the endless view of eucalypts out into the distance. It's quieter, gentler.

I think I will make up a new name. It will mean the end of A Town and a Half - I'll close it off, and start again somewhere else. I'll leave it all still sitting here though, so I can look back through the highs and lows of our time in North Queensland. It was quite a rollercoaster in the end.